RE: killer Asteroid

You send a probe armed with nukes. Upon arrival, it surveys the asteriod to determine where the best places t obut it would be. It puts the nukes(probably some sort of laser-guided missile) on the surface, and moves out of the danger area before it detonates. Armed with several nukes, if one or two didn't do the job, you can try again without too much trouble. You could even try to put it in a stable earth orbit.

 

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THat's the idea!

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Most likely the bomb would penetrate several meters before detonating.

Some problems with that: mass of the engine(putting something that big on the proper trajectory), the fuel, and having sufficient power to move an asteriod wieghing several million tons fast enough to alter its course in time.

BTW soft landing a ~100 ton engine, and smashing a hardened laser-guided rocket(less than 3,000 lbs) into the thing are two very different stories.

 

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Andre,

Does not several hundred kilograms of fusing plasma traveling at a good percentage the speed of light not have any force?

Does trillions of watts of light not have any force?

Does heat and vaporized asteroid matter not have any force especially when if flies of the surface of the asteroid with Newton’s 3nd law and all?

A nuclear detonation just above a asteroid could still change the asteroid’s vector as well as a direct impact, but without the damage and chance of fragmentation.

 

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If I recall my physics correctly, first you have to overcome intertia as well. How much inertia does 2 million tons of rock have?

And we were thinking of building nuclear bunker busters, which would, due to their low yield, be even more sensitive.

This would be why you survey the asteriod first, to find out the where and how big for the explosion. The probe would carry as many as half a dozen warheads so that you can start as soon as you've figured out where your going to hit it.

 

Hum, I say we survey it with a probe and launch up nukes separate. A single probe with that many nukes would weigh a lot it would take a very big boost like Energia to get it of the ground. We might not be able to get it up in time. A small probe and volley after volley of nukes pummeling the thing like paint balloons against an anti-abortion poster, is the way to go.

 

I think that's the consensus, that many small nukes would be more effective and controllable than one big bang. I do think planting them rather than impacting them would be better, but it all depends on the type of rock and how much time you have to play around with it.

A comet, while fragile, would vaporize as thrust better than a rocky body. But again, better to use small thrusts than try and do it all in one big one.

 

Only the probe would come in slow.

 

The idea behind launching the nukes with the probe was that you wouldn't be spending two months waiting for the probe to get there, spend two weeks surveying and analyzing, and then a month and a half waiting for the nukes to get there. I agree, seperate would be easier to get off the ground, but you don't want to wait too long. The warheads can stay in orbit around the rock until ou decide where to put them.

That's why you survey it first, and already having the nukes there gives you some extra time.

 

The time difference can be control... in fact the time it would take to get such a large probe there and the time needed to place all the nukes would take longer then by getting a small probe there an hamming it with nukes days or weeks later.

 

Let's face it, if a few weeks would make a big difference, it's already too close, and we're screwed. It takes both time and effort to move a few million metric tons. Six, twelve, eighteen months is a collision window we never want to see.

The point of rendevous time is a good one. Whatever method we use, whether it be planting engines or nukes, we should have them in stationkeeping far outside the inner solar system, along with the monitoring systems. That way the course is always vectored similarly to the rock, and it's just a matter of optimizing the meeting place. Especially for comets...nothing launched from Earth would ever be able to get out there and then reverse to match the comet's speed before the angle of deflection is too great to deal with.

 

It would take months to get a volley of nukes to a NEA, the nukes don't need to worry about velocity change though because all they need to do is aim and explode before impact. But even so how much of a change in course are we going to get here? If the asteroid is large maybe a few centimeters a second! So we need to do these years before impact. Comets on the other hand: if the things going to impact in its first detected orbit then we would only have months or just weeks before we die: no time for a counterstrike! If its going to impact after several orbits that might give us the time we need to get some nukes to meet up with it.