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Russians have scientists working on the meteorite problem, but I doubt the military would do a hail Mary launch on this. If anything, they would much rather let

by eksith 14y ago

Russians have scientists working on the meteorite problem, but I doubt the military would do a hail Mary launch on this. If anything, they would much rather let it fall intact than risk having it break up and spread damage to a much larger area. But that still assumes they can respond quickly enough or had missiles on standby with weapons that can affect a meteorite (not specifically ballistic reentry capsules, but actual meteorites). There's a worrying thought. It may be hot enough for infrared seekers, but it's no jet. Jets are fragile by comparison so, unless they had purely kinetic weapons... but that's still speculation at this point. We still don't know what the Russians did or if they did anything at all. I doubt they even knew this specific meteor would enter the atmosphere. It's already hard enough detecting much bigger rocks in Earth-crossing orbits.

jandrewrogers 14y ago
It does seem silly to intercept. The computers could ascertain that the trajectory was unlikely to have originated on Earth in milliseconds. Modern terminal guidance systems are all imaging based. Or at least the US ones have been for a couple decades; I imagine the Russians are using something at least vaguely similar. Basically, the missiles latch onto the target visually and are capable of recognizing their target from the details of its appearance (in an air defense context, not just "an airplane" but "that specific airplane"). It is why, contra Hollywood, modern terminal guidance systems are nigh impossible to spoof. The missile knows what the airplane looks like and can read the tail number off your craft, so as long as it can locate it (even if it temporarily loses sight), it is likely to hit unless the motor runs out of gas. Heat has little to do with it, though the imagers often work in broad spectrum infrared. Lots of smaller, impacters with kiloton-class impact energies are never discovered or discovered at the very last minute. This looks like a pretty small rock in terms of damage done so it could easily have been missed by sky surveys.
estel 14y ago
If they had the time to go through the chain of command and reach a measured, rational decision, perhaps; but it's quite possible that a crew manning a missile defence platform had only a few seconds to decide on a course of action, and went with "better safe than sorry" without considering whether it even was something that could break up.

by eksith 14y ago

jandrewrogers 14y ago

It does seem silly to intercept. The computers could ascertain that the trajectory was unlikely to have originated on Earth in milliseconds. Modern terminal guidance systems are all imaging based. Or at least the US ones have been for a couple decades; I imagine the Russians are using something at least vaguely similar. Basically, the missiles latch onto the target visually and are capable of recognizing their target from the details of its appearance (in an air defense context, not just "an airplane" but "that specific airplane"). It is why, contra Hollywood, modern terminal guidance systems are nigh impossible to spoof. The missile knows what the airplane looks like and can read the tail number off your craft, so as long as it can locate it (even if it temporarily loses sight), it is likely to hit unless the motor runs out of gas. Heat has little to do with it, though the imagers often work in broad spectrum infrared. Lots of smaller, impacters with kiloton-class impact energies are never discovered or discovered at the very last minute. This looks like a pretty small rock in terms of damage done so it could easily have been missed by sky surveys.

estel 14y ago

If they had the time to go through the chain of command and reach a measured, rational decision, perhaps; but it's quite possible that a crew manning a missile defence platform had only a few seconds to decide on a course of action, and went with "better safe than sorry" without considering whether it even was something that could break up.