Posted on 07/25/2002 7:35:52 AM PDT by dead
An asteroid which could hit the Earth in 17 years time should be blown away with a nuclear weapon, an Australian astronomer said today.
If left untouched the asteroid could plummet to Earth, causing tidal waves and mayhem.
The best way to ensure it was diverted was to put a nuclear weapon beside it and blow it out of orbit, Stromlo Observatory astronomer Vince Ford said.
Scientists are still trying to determine whether the asteroid, known by NASA as 2002 NT7, will hit the Earth in 2019.
NASA says it is still too early to tell whether the remote possibility will become more likely.
Experts will have a clearer picture soon.
"As new observations come in, the situation will evolve in the next days and, as usual, either the probability associated with this object will go up somewhat, or, more probably, it will disappear," NASA said on its website.
Dr Ford said nudging it with a stockpiled nuclear weapon could help alleviate the problem for 1,000 years.
"That'd be the way to do it," Dr Ford told the Seven Network.
"Forget sending Brucie Willis up to drill into it and blow it into small bits, that's unlikely to work.
"No what you do is put a nuke along side the thing and blow it sideways...(a) use for some of the stockpile."
Dr Ford's solution echoes the plot of the movie Armageddon in which Bruce Willis starred as an oil driller who landed on an Earth-bound asteroid the size of Texas to insert nuclear charges to blow it up.
The movie had an 18-day time frame, but there was much more time to deal with 2002 NT7, Dr Ford said.
"You've got 17 years to think of how to do it but basically what you do is rendezvous with it, blow something alongside it, kick it off onto a different track," he said.
2002 NT7 is a chunk of rock four kilometres across.
"Now if that hits remember you've not just got the 20 kilometres per second movement of the asteroid, you've got the Earth coming the other way at 30km per second," Dr Ford said.
"You drop a chunk of iron travelling at 50km per second onto anything, you've got troubles.
"Let's say it hit anywhere in Europe, the whole of Europe would be well, in deep trouble.”
"Worst thing of course is if it hit the ocean.
"If this thing hit the Pacific Ocean anywhere, the whole of the Pacific rim would go, tidal waves, whatever.
"It might be the only time it's good to live in Canberra, in fact."
AAP
Couldn't they hit it with Rosie O'Donnell, travelling at 50 kilometers per second? It'd go flying like an 8-ball hite with a cueball.
Have you read the numbers on just how close it will come? Even if it does miss...it won't be by much! That will cause so much chaos and disruption on Earth...it will make an Al Qaeda attack look like child's play.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
Plus, assuming NASA determines a high probability of a hit by a single big object, wouldn't blowing the object into pieces tend to spread the object out, making it likely that many of the pieces would miss Earth--that is, only the pieces in the center of the swarm (assuming the initial rock is dead on and assuming the orbit of the entire swarm is not changed) would hit. That rock is going to go a long way in 17 years and the swarm would have a long time to spread out.
Since you seem to know whereof you speak, one more question. Would our largest nuclear bombs have enough energy to nudge the rock enough or to break it into pieces? A lot of a nuclear explosion in space is just going to disappate in the wrong direction. In fact, since the nuclear weapon would not actually throw a subsantial amount of mass at the object, how would energy transfer to the object. Of course it would throw a lot of subatomic particles at the asteroid; but how much energy could be transmitted in that manner.
Sorry about the barrage of questions. This could be a very serious matter and I am curious.
I have a bit of a problem with this idea at this point. They don't know if it will hit, come close, or miss us by a LARGE distance. What happens if they nudge it INTO the path of the earth by accident?
I lean towards the several nukes school, give it a few good, hard nudges. We don't have a precise plot of the orbit, nor do we have a good idea of shape or rotation of the body. That will come in the upcoming months. If it DOES seem to be a problem (I define a "problem" as asteroid coming closer than lunar orbit. . . ), THEN we build ourselves a deep-space equivalent of a MIRVed ICBM, and send it off to nudge the rock out of our way. . .
As for the small pieces, you're correct, IF THE PIECES are small enough. If you break it into a conglomeration of city-block-sized pieces, you're going to have problems. . .
Fooling with this until we are dead certain where it is going and what the effects of our meddling would be is not a good idea.
Now, as for the throw-weight of our nukes, I know very little about yields, and I suspect that real detail here is classified. But, at least according to an article I read in Scientific American in the early 1980's, there appears to be such a thing as a "shaped nuke", just like there are shaped charges of conventional explosives. Assuming such IS actually possible, I suspect we'd use that sort of nuke.
As for the energy transfer, the energetic particles of the bomb itself would transfer their energy to the matter of the asteroid, and since it's vacuum on one side, and rock on the other, the explosive vaporization would be on the side of the bomb blast, producing a massive short-term thrust along the rough line of the original blast. It's all Newtonian physics from there (g)
It's the Universes way of cleansing... totally natural and organic... with a hint of extinction!.
Seems fitting.
It'll give the Euroweenie Green Party something valid to whine about for a change.
Let them figure out their own solution.
It oughta keep 'em preoccupied and outa our business.
A quick search for '2002 NT7' brings up the long term asteroid encounter site which does list a 2019 encounter by '2002 NT7' but at .17 AU's distance, hardly a threat. See web page:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/CloseAppLong.html
Another look at the 'Potentially hazardous asteroids' site at:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/PHACloseApp.html
doesn't even list NT7, though there are obviously hundreds of others with more imminent encounter dates that we never hear about. No indication of the size (mass) of the listed objects is given, though it may be there and I can't read the product correctly.
So where is all the hubbub about NT7 coming from?
If it was going to hit Massachussetts, we'd do nothing at all.
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