Posted on 10/11/2022 1:04:24 PM PDT by Red Badger
We could send Tom Cruise...
Dang.
NASA Confirms DART Mission Impact Changed Asteroid’s Motion in Space now headed to Earth, & bringing friends ... big friends.
She just learned Newtons Law #1: A body at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by another body or force.
Good luck trying to stop a gamma ray burst wiping us all out. The oldest GRB detected is thought to have released in just 1 second around 300 times the energy that our sun will release in it’s life of 10 billion years. The star Apep ( serpent diety) in the constellation Norma, is a possible GRB candidate.
Another meteor shower would be cool.🙂
Anything we can move with a projectile that is on a collision course with earth is totally irrelevant. Anything that small that can be altered in course greatly is no danger. Something big headed our way needs something big to move it. We are talking nukes.
The vast amount of energy of destruction from nukes is due to X-Rays released. They heat the air to incredible temps causing a shock wave of destruction and surface vaporization from said same X-Rays. In space there is no atmosphere. Almost all the energy is X-Ray. The incoming asteroid would have vaporization on its surface and thus a repulsive force due to gases of vaporization. It will not destroy the asteroid but put it on a safe trajectory.
Granted that the orbital time decreased due to the impact, but would orbital time also decrease because of the now lighter mass of the asteroid (ejecta loss)?
This could be a great plot for a disaster film. The path of the asteroid they alter could intersect and alter another, bigger asteroid’s path, sending it on a collision course with Earth.
They could call it “The Butterfly’s Wings”
When man with celestial orbs doth interfere
The boulders fall from wife’s brassiere.
And wincing the nonce, in timely rhyme
A fools paradise lost, whence horned sublime.
( Willie Shagsphere)
Whatever they say about their reasons, this was effectively a test of a weapon system which could wipe out continents in a single strike.
Find a big thing which grazes Earth (such as Apophis) and smash a small thing into in a very carefully calibrated manner. Now you have a weapon to take out thousands of square miles at a location of your choosing. And there’s many objects out there larger than Apophis, some of them large enough to melt continents.
This experiment provides data for the calibrating of future deflections.
So they bumped it and now it’s a little bit different orbit.
But would not the same gravitational forces that created the previous orbit still exist and slowly bring it back to where it was?
Seems that the loss of mass from the impact might change it’s orbit a bit though.
Next test, embed the nose of a rocket near the axis of rotation of a larger asteroid, then ignite the rocket to change the trajectory of the asteroid.
Blueprint for the Apophis mission. TBD before April 2029.
That’s very dicey stuff. There are a lot of uncertainties about the composition of these bodies, from one to another, essentially boiling down to how solid, cohesive, and homogeneous they are. At the very high speeds and energy densities involved in a collision, a rather extreme form of fluid dynamics is in play. We DO understand quite a bit about those dynamics, given a known target material, but, if the material varies from asteroid to asteroid, and quite possibly laterally and with depth within an asteroid, unless a target point on the proposed “weapon” asteroid was carefully scrutinized (and at some depth), with some additional analysis of the rest of the body, smacking the asteroid into Earth within a few hundred miles of a given spot would be highly unlikely.
All this activity, plus the shove of the asteroid itself would have to somehow be kept secret / unobserved.
The uncertainties about the target body are part of why the results in this particular test had such a very wide range of possibilities. That can be narrowed down a bit, but overall the whole idea is pretty impractical with technology humans will have in any less than 100 years, at the rate we are going presently.
Nice shootin’.
I told everyone it was heading for Earth!!
Yes, which is why they smack them with projectiles and analyze the debris cloud. If a body was found to have a solid enough composition they might attach large solid-fuel rockets to it and fire them off to get a deflection when the object was only weeks or days away from closest approach to Earth.
Once the change in course was detected the target area would have some warning but realistically how long would it take to evacuate a continent?
Good question.
I think that the loss of mass would cause the ORBIT of the asteroid to INCREASE in diameter, since the pull of gravity from its host would be lessened, therefore it’s orbital period would increase.
But the kinetic energy of the impact cause the orbital period to decrease, so it offset the mass loss tendency to increase.
The impact apparently was more like a ball on a roulette wheel being spun by the croupier.................
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