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Really burying the important takeaway at the bottom: Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile — funded by the National Science Foundation — wil

Really burying the important takeaway at the bottom: Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile — funded by the National Science Foundation — will catalog the solar system from the ground... "It took us 200 years to discover all the asteroids we know to date, about 1.2 million asteroids," Mario Jurić, the Rubin Observatory's solar system discovery team lead and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Astronomy. "In the first three to six months of Rubin, we will double that." That's one additional ground based observatory coming online in the Southern hemisphere. If we get our act together and build a lot more of these and other space based observatories we're going to see the true scope of the "shooting gallery". We really need to raise public awareness of this, as a planet based civilization we are taking our chances by ignoring the problem and assuming everything will be fine for a hundred or a thousand more years. All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe will be for naught if we get smoked by a rock big enough to fill the atmosphere with particulate matter and drop global temperatures for years afterward let alone anything bigger resulting in global firestorms and tsunamis.

oceanplexian 3y ago
Doesn’t even need to be a planet killer, even a small object like the Tunguska event hitting a large city (Like NYC) would cost trillions in damage and millions of lives, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off. The cost to build some surveillance and technology to mitigate it would be far less. And prevention wouldn’t require Bruce Willis to blow it up with nukes, like the DART mission all you’d need is to hit the space rock with a fast moving, small probe and alter its course by a millionth of a degree far enough out, could be the difference between hitting a city, landing in the ocean, or not hitting earth at all.
- vorticalbox 3y ago
  I read somewhere about the idea of sending white paint to coat one side this would cause one side to get hotter and cause the asteroid to spin sending it off course. I'm quite sure it wouldn't work but was an interesting idea.
  - readyplayernull 3y ago
    The problem is that they rotate. Maybe an electronically controlled jet that triggers only when aligned in the right direction.
    - truculent 3y ago
      Presumably it would be more efficient to use jet to stabilise it, so that the painted deflector can take effect
      - zamadatix 3y ago
        If you can detect it early enough an absolutely miniscule amount of force can multiply over time to an enormous difference in position later on. Much less force than would be required to stop it from spinning or sending material to act as a deflector.
        willmadden 3y ago
        You would want to design and test a vectoring nuclear thermal rocket built to absorb neutrons and reduce thrust on one side, and burn 100% on the other side, with the ability to gimbal the thrust vector depending on the asteroid's orientation. This gives you a much bigger margin of error versus "white paint" or conventional rockets imo. You probably wouldn't want to nuke it, because you risk buck shotting the earth with a cloud of asteroids. Having a vectored nuclear rocket also allows you to change your trajectory if your initial calculations are off.
        willmadden 3y ago
        The other problem is propellent. I think using the material of the asteroid itself as propellent makes the most sense.
- lencastre 3y ago
  Challenge accepted!
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  A Tunguska event exploding over Moscow could even trigger the 'Perimeter' system without human intervention. And likely most of the missiles are pre-programmed with US targets...
- echoangle 3y ago
  The probability of that is really low though, theres not a lot of area with dense population when looking at the whole earth. And for your redirection to work, you would need really precise trajectory predictions while still very far away so a small impulse is enough.
  - Gow8876 3y ago
    A couple of nukes missile will be more than enough to fragment it and split the trajectory to less denser population. But just like Leonardo movie look up, nothing will be done as everyone will just quarrel for attention and inaction.
hyperthesis 3y ago
Wouldn't the most dangerous trajectories be the hardest to observe? Of those 1.2 million orbits, how many are dangerous?
- lazide 3y ago
  Don’t forget, occasionally the trajectories get perturbed. If it helps you sleep at night, over the billions of years earth has been in its current orbit, it’s already ‘eaten’ all the high risk asteroids. What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards. Which do exist. But the earths crust was molten in it’s early life due in some large part due to persistent and high volume infalling asteroids, and that time is long gone.
  - willmadden 3y ago
    >it’s already ‘eaten’ all the high risk asteroids. >What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards. How do you know this?
    - lazide 3y ago
      Because we’re here at all. And it’s a simple bit of math. Asteroid collisions with our planet (or any other planet) destroys the asteroid. unless something is making ‘new events’ (creating new asteroids, which we know of little/no mechanism for), we’re currently left only with asteroids which have managed to avoid impacting us or another planet for the billions of years before now they’ve been floating around the solar system. Over x billions of years, the 1 in 1000 events have all played out. The 1 in 1000000 events have all played out, etc, etc. So we’re just left with the lowest odds events, aka the ones with the lowest probability/lowest risk of occurring. The long-long-long tail. It doesn’t mean we won’t get whacked by a shoemaker/levy impact in the future, just that the odds of it occurring now are very very low compared to say several billion years ago when there were far more objects floating around that hadn’t terminated their orbits into something already. Of course, we also have a lot more incentive now to prevent such an occurrence (as we have stuff we don’t want to have destroyed now) as compared to several billion years ago when we didn’t exist. So worth investing into. But we’re not looking for common/predictable situations, we’re looking for very unusual occurrences and hoping for enough forewarning to make it easy to deal with the consequences. If this was a matter of dealing with high probability events, we’d have a very different approach.
Ma8ee 3y ago
> All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe… Uh, which efforts?

oceanplexian 3y ago

Doesn’t even need to be a planet killer, even a small object like the Tunguska event hitting a large city (Like NYC) would cost trillions in damage and millions of lives, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off. The cost to build some surveillance and technology to mitigate it would be far less. And prevention wouldn’t require Bruce Willis to blow it up with nukes, like the DART mission all you’d need is to hit the space rock with a fast moving, small probe and alter its course by a millionth of a degree far enough out, could be the difference between hitting a city, landing in the ocean, or not hitting earth at all.

vorticalbox 3y ago
I read somewhere about the idea of sending white paint to coat one side this would cause one side to get hotter and cause the asteroid to spin sending it off course. I'm quite sure it wouldn't work but was an interesting idea.
- readyplayernull 3y ago
  The problem is that they rotate. Maybe an electronically controlled jet that triggers only when aligned in the right direction.
  - truculent 3y ago
    Presumably it would be more efficient to use jet to stabilise it, so that the painted deflector can take effect
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      If you can detect it early enough an absolutely miniscule amount of force can multiply over time to an enormous difference in position later on. Much less force than would be required to stop it from spinning or sending material to act as a deflector.
      - willmadden 3y ago
        You would want to design and test a vectoring nuclear thermal rocket built to absorb neutrons and reduce thrust on one side, and burn 100% on the other side, with the ability to gimbal the thrust vector depending on the asteroid's orientation. This gives you a much bigger margin of error versus "white paint" or conventional rockets imo. You probably wouldn't want to nuke it, because you risk buck shotting the earth with a cloud of asteroids. Having a vectored nuclear rocket also allows you to change your trajectory if your initial calculations are off.
        willmadden 3y ago
        The other problem is propellent. I think using the material of the asteroid itself as propellent makes the most sense.
lencastre 3y ago
Challenge accepted!
MichaelZuo 3y ago
A Tunguska event exploding over Moscow could even trigger the 'Perimeter' system without human intervention. And likely most of the missiles are pre-programmed with US targets...
echoangle 3y ago
The probability of that is really low though, theres not a lot of area with dense population when looking at the whole earth. And for your redirection to work, you would need really precise trajectory predictions while still very far away so a small impulse is enough.
- Gow8876 3y ago
  A couple of nukes missile will be more than enough to fragment it and split the trajectory to less denser population. But just like Leonardo movie look up, nothing will be done as everyone will just quarrel for attention and inaction.

hyperthesis 3y ago

Wouldn't the most dangerous trajectories be the hardest to observe? Of those 1.2 million orbits, how many are dangerous?

lazide 3y ago
Don’t forget, occasionally the trajectories get perturbed. If it helps you sleep at night, over the billions of years earth has been in its current orbit, it’s already ‘eaten’ all the high risk asteroids. What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards. Which do exist. But the earths crust was molten in it’s early life due in some large part due to persistent and high volume infalling asteroids, and that time is long gone.
- willmadden 3y ago
  >it’s already ‘eaten’ all the high risk asteroids. >What we’re dealing with now are very much the long-long-long tail hazards. How do you know this?
  - lazide 3y ago
    Because we’re here at all. And it’s a simple bit of math. Asteroid collisions with our planet (or any other planet) destroys the asteroid. unless something is making ‘new events’ (creating new asteroids, which we know of little/no mechanism for), we’re currently left only with asteroids which have managed to avoid impacting us or another planet for the billions of years before now they’ve been floating around the solar system. Over x billions of years, the 1 in 1000 events have all played out. The 1 in 1000000 events have all played out, etc, etc. So we’re just left with the lowest odds events, aka the ones with the lowest probability/lowest risk of occurring. The long-long-long tail. It doesn’t mean we won’t get whacked by a shoemaker/levy impact in the future, just that the odds of it occurring now are very very low compared to say several billion years ago when there were far more objects floating around that hadn’t terminated their orbits into something already. Of course, we also have a lot more incentive now to prevent such an occurrence (as we have stuff we don’t want to have destroyed now) as compared to several billion years ago when we didn’t exist. So worth investing into. But we’re not looking for common/predictable situations, we’re looking for very unusual occurrences and hoping for enough forewarning to make it easy to deal with the consequences. If this was a matter of dealing with high probability events, we’d have a very different approach.

Ma8ee 3y ago

> All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe… Uh, which efforts?