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The variability of composition of asteroids, from rubble piles to solid masses, makes me think that future asteroid diversion missions will look not so much lik
by jl6 4y ago
The variability of composition of asteroids, from rubble piles to solid masses, makes me think that future asteroid diversion missions will look not so much like a big gun fired at the last minute, and more like a decades-long programme of search, analysis, and engineering tailored to each target.
- ulfw 4y agoyou don't always have decades though to predict an Asteroid impact event
- saiya-jin 4y agoWouldn't nuke going off just next to it nudge anything enough off course to not have to worry about composition? Or Hollywood yet again inserted a very unrealistic picture of how things work in my head. Or we strictly prefer not sending nukes up there outside WWIII scenario. But then plenty of satellites have/had nuclear fuel as main source of energy, just not critical mass for anything BAM, just nasty dispersion in the upper atmosphere threat.
- XorNot 4y agoA nuke going off "near" anything in space will do very little damage - there's no shockwave propagation, so all you have is the bombs heat - which at least half gets wasted on empty space. One of of the big problems with nuking asteroids is, as in this case, if it's a rubble pile then it can be considerably difficult to get enough physical contact with it to even meaningfully effect it. Hence the reason for DART: we've got an impressive something but the question is did we even successfully deflect the trajectory of the bulk of the material?
- ncmncm 4y agoA lot of smallish bolides could be much worse than one big one. Particularly if the big one would miss, but many of the saller ones don't.
- BatteryMountain 4y agoOr, just fling a giant tarp or net (depending on whether it seems solid or not) at it and pull it in a different direction instead of essentially firing a projectile at it.