Henry Bowman
Veteran Member
Wonder what major f^ckery is going on that they need a big distraction from ?
DISASTER Why Is NASA Working So Hard To Learn How To Defend The Earth From Giant Asteroids?
- Thread starter jward
- Start date
PghPanther
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Masterphreak
Senior Member
Many things we think of as valuable are so only because of their rarity. Flood the market with some formerly rare commodity to the point where it becomes common as dirt, and it's value changes accordingly.
Case and point being the value of diamonds. Between strict control of the supply and a PR campaign bar none DeBeers stays in the money.
Asteroid mining only really becomes a real thing beyond proof of concept and novelty when an extra-terrestrial project's costs to lift materials up and out of Earth's gravity well exceeds capability and economies of scale yet the project either has to be done or eventually will be done.
Until then, that same technology is IMHO best used to try and prevent a repeat of what happened to the dinosaurs.
That being said, if they're really serious about this they need to start seriously funding a survey of the solar neighborhood for such rocks. That's going to cost real money and isn't as sexy as big rockets and "interceptor vehicles" to the public or the Swamp Dwellers.
danielboon
TB Fanatic
Does anyone seriously imagine that we should not now be raising the funding to sort this out? Is that really the view of responsible Conservatives? I can tell you something – Margaret Thatcher would not have ignored this meteorite that has just crashed through the public finances. She would have wagged her finger and said more borrowing now is just higher interest rates and even higher taxes later. UK Prime Minster Boris Johnson Boris Johnson’s conference speech: what he said and what he meant
Biden warns on failing to lift debt limit: ‘A meteor is headed to crash into our economy’
www.marketwatch.com
Biden warns on failing to lift debt limit: ‘A meteor is headed to crash into our economy’
Biden warns on failing to lift debt limit: 'A meteor is headed to crash into our economy'
President Joe Biden on Monday warns about the dangers of failing to raise the federal borrowing limit and blasts Republican lawmakers' approach to the issue.
www.marketwatch.com
“A meteor is headed to crash into our economy,” Biden said during a White House speech. “Democrats are willing to do all the work stopping it. Republicans just have to let us do our job — just get out of the way.”
- Biden warns on failing to lift debt limit: ‘A meteor is headed to crash into our economy’ - MarketWatch
Mitch fixed it for ya.
- Biden warns on failing to lift debt limit: ‘A meteor is headed to crash into our economy’ - MarketWatch
Mitch fixed it for ya.
pauldingbabe
The Great Cat
So wait...
SapceX is going to deliver something to "bump" an asteroid off course?
Ummmm
I can think of many ways this goes wrong. And I'm no rocket surgeon.
SapceX is going to deliver something to "bump" an asteroid off course?
Ummmm
I can think of many ways this goes wrong. And I'm no rocket surgeon.
danielboon
TB Fanatic
Yes he did
jward
passin' thru
See there?! Didn't I tell y'all the "vax" was just marinade, so we'd be nice and tender when our Alien Overlords rode in on their errant asteroid, ready to BBQ us for DinDin?
..There they are now, Right on Schedule
..There they are now, Right on Schedule
NASA Announces it Will Launch Spacecraft to ‘Nudge’ Asteroid Off Path From Hitting Earth | Gregg Jarrett
NASA made a startling announcement that it will be making an attempt to deflect an asteroid in space from hitting the Earth. The plan is to launch athegreggjarrett.com
NASA Announces it Will Launch Spacecraft to ‘Nudge’ Asteroid Off Path From Hitting Earth
BY JARRETT STAFF
OCTOBER 6, 2021
NASA made a startling announcement that it will be making an attempt to deflect an asteroid in space from hitting the Earth. The plan is to launch a spacecraft in late November to literally smash into “one of the two asteroids, known as Didymoon, at roughly 13,500mph on October 2, 2022” reports The Daily Mail.
“In doing so, it will change the speed of Didymoon a fraction of a percent, but it will be enough so NASA can measure its altered orbit.” The attempt with the spacecraft is known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. DART will be sent to the pair of asteroids, “the Didymos binary – at 1:20 a.m. EST on November 24 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.”
NASA considers anything that comes within 4.6 million miles of Earth and has more than a 460-foot diameter as “potentially hazardous.” In a statement, NASA said, “DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion.”
The Didymoon is 524 feet wide and orbits a larger space rock known as Didymos that is approximately 2,559 feet across. Didymoon came within 3.7 million miles of Earth in 2003. Project scientist for DART, Dr. Nancy Chabot previously told DailyMail.com “planetary defense is really about the present solar system and what are we going to do in the present.”
“DART is not the final answer but rather just the first important step if we needed to defend the Earth from an asteroid impact. Finding the asteroids that pose potential impact risks to Earth tracking them, and characterizing them are critically important to all planetary defense efforts.
ivantherussian03
Veteran Member
Space Force…. A jobs program.
Sid Vicious
Veteran Member
I think a better example would be aluminum. As I understand it the Washington Monument was topped with a small aluminum pyramid because at that time in history pure aluminum was quite valuable. Now people throw aluminum cans on the ground without a second thought.
In any case, maybe people are thinking of the metallic meteorites and thinking they're all like that, but not all asteroids are alike. A heck of a lot them (maybe as high as 90%) are just hunks of crappy rock without any redeeming value whatsoever.
Aluminum's rarity back then had to do with the technology available to smelt it out of ore sources.
Well, sure. But I think it makes a better case about mining asteroids and how abundance makes something less valuable. Once the technology evolves to make it more than someone's wet dream and so common that no one cares about the latest incoming asteroid mining cargo, those asteroids won't be nearly as valuable as a large scale one-off mining mission now. Barring some truly spectacular leaps in propulsion and life support technology, mining in space by humans (as opposed to robots) is going to stay expensive (and rare) for a long time to come. I imagine none of us alive today will see it become "common."
kyrsyan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
From something learned a long time ago, in another lifetime, asteroids come closer than many people realize. But it is not information that gets out. Long and old story there just not worth retelling at this point.
If NASA is experimenting with destroying them, I'd say one got a bit closer than TPTB were comfortable with. Or someone somewhere managed to convince folks that testing ideas would be better than waiting until the last moment and praying that they worked.
Either way, if one is headed our way I don't want to know. I'd rather live my last days and hours in peace than be stressed and panicked or watch people react in insane ways.
If NASA is experimenting with destroying them, I'd say one got a bit closer than TPTB were comfortable with. Or someone somewhere managed to convince folks that testing ideas would be better than waiting until the last moment and praying that they worked.
Either way, if one is headed our way I don't want to know. I'd rather live my last days and hours in peace than be stressed and panicked or watch people react in insane ways.
It seems like a lot of pieces falling into place. The Orange Man Bad no matter what sky screamers mocked the Space Force. The MSM and late night talking heads who drive the left narrative didn’t touch on Space Force much. The narrative drivers let it fade quickly.
NASA has turned over a large portion of what justified their budget over to private enterprise. Right now, Bezos is in third place as he just acts like a publicity stunt. Branson has thought long term and built a state of the art spaceport first.
And then we have Elon and SpaceX. They developed the reusable rocket which has long been the holy grail of rocket science. Love or hate Elon, access to space by private enterprise is now the norm. Additionally he’s making it cheaper and more reliable.
So NASA has passed off projects to private enterprise.Their budget and resources can go to the Space Force. So why is the Space Force looking at asteroids? If they can find a way to knock off a chunk and control it, they can aim for Beijing and cause a Tunguska level blast. And that doesn’t have our fingerprints on it.
NASA has turned over a large portion of what justified their budget over to private enterprise. Right now, Bezos is in third place as he just acts like a publicity stunt. Branson has thought long term and built a state of the art spaceport first.
And then we have Elon and SpaceX. They developed the reusable rocket which has long been the holy grail of rocket science. Love or hate Elon, access to space by private enterprise is now the norm. Additionally he’s making it cheaper and more reliable.
So NASA has passed off projects to private enterprise.Their budget and resources can go to the Space Force. So why is the Space Force looking at asteroids? If they can find a way to knock off a chunk and control it, they can aim for Beijing and cause a Tunguska level blast. And that doesn’t have our fingerprints on it.
kyrsyan
Has No Life - Lives on TB
From other things, not quite so many lifetimes ago, NASA came very, very, very close to being closed and privatized. Way closer than anyone realizes. And that would have been a major loss. But NASA was saved. That meant that all these companies that had been looking to acquire needed to do something with the science they had been creating, and they weren't likely to just hand it over for free. So now you are seeing private space industry. And truthfully, that is a good thing.
As crazy as it may sound, creating Space Force as another branch of the military may keep NASA safe if that situation is recreated. And as a military branch, Space Force does have to look at defense.
As crazy as it may sound, creating Space Force as another branch of the military may keep NASA safe if that situation is recreated. And as a military branch, Space Force does have to look at defense.
packyderms_wife
Neither here nor there.
This^^^ Nailed it!
Ping Jockey
Inactive
It ain’t gonna be pretty.
bracketquant
Veteran Member
That might be Apophis. First it was said that it might hit. Now it's said that it won't. Time will tell.
packyderms_wife
Neither here nor there.
There's a rock that's supposed to get really close in 2030, if nothing disturbs it's orbit.
jward
passin' thru
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test
An exploration of Earth’s defences will launch next month
It will check how far it is possible to deflect an incoming asteroid
Oct 13th 2021
THE DEPARTURE of Lucy, on October 16th, if all goes well, is not the only forthcoming mission with asteroids as its destination. On November 24th DART should follow. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, though, has a more practical purpose than Lucy. It will assess the feasibility of changing an asteroid’s path, should one be discovered that threatens to collide with Earth.
Listen to this story
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
DART, a probe weighing 600kg, is intended to crash, in September 2022, into Dimorphos, a tiny asteroid in orbit around a larger one, Didymos, at a velocity of 6.2km per second. The intention is to alter the speed of Dimorphos’s orbit by about half a millimetre a second, thus shortening its orbital period, now 11.9 hours, by about ten minutes.
Didymos is 780 metres across. According to the project’s lead investigator, Andrew Cheng of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, if an object that size hit Earth it could devastate half a continent, causing firestorms and a subsequent cooling of the climate that might last for years. But even something the size of Dimorphos, only 160 metres across, would do a lot of damage. Its impact would create an explosion equivalent to 400-600 megatonnes of TNT. By comparison, the Tunguska bolide that exploded over Siberia in 1908, flattening more than 2,000km2 of forest, released something like 20 megatonnes. And recently published evidence suggests that an explosion of similar size to Tunguska destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a city in the Jordan valley, in about 1650BC.
There are, moreover, a lot of unknown asteroids out there. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Programme, intended to discover 90% of asteroids larger than 140 metres across that have orbits near Earth’s, is reckoned to have so far found less than half of them. None yet located is seen as a threat. But if such a threat were identified, the question would be whether anything could be done about it.
If collision with Earth was imminent, the answer is probably “no”. But if it were years or decades away, a nudge of the sort DART will give Dimorphos could change a space rock’s path enough for it to miss Earth after all—even a tiny alteration in such a body’s orbit will grow over time.
Dimorphos’s behaviour after DART hits it will thus be the subject of intense scrutiny. The impact itself will be monitored by LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids). This is a small craft, built by Italy’s space agency, which will be launched along with DART and separate from it shortly before impact. After that, Didymos and Dimorphos will be tracked by ground-based telescopes. Then, in 2024, the European Space Agency will launch a follow-up craft called Hera that will arrive at the double asteroid in 2026, for a more detailed inspection. All these data will then be crunched to find out just how feasible an asteroid-deflection mission would be.
With luck, no such mission will ever be needed. But if one is, DART may prove to be the most important space probe ever to have flown.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Nudge, nudge"
www.economist.com
An exploration of Earth’s defences will launch next month
It will check how far it is possible to deflect an incoming asteroid
Oct 13th 2021
THE DEPARTURE of Lucy, on October 16th, if all goes well, is not the only forthcoming mission with asteroids as its destination. On November 24th DART should follow. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test, though, has a more practical purpose than Lucy. It will assess the feasibility of changing an asteroid’s path, should one be discovered that threatens to collide with Earth.
Listen to this story
Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
DART, a probe weighing 600kg, is intended to crash, in September 2022, into Dimorphos, a tiny asteroid in orbit around a larger one, Didymos, at a velocity of 6.2km per second. The intention is to alter the speed of Dimorphos’s orbit by about half a millimetre a second, thus shortening its orbital period, now 11.9 hours, by about ten minutes.
Didymos is 780 metres across. According to the project’s lead investigator, Andrew Cheng of Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, if an object that size hit Earth it could devastate half a continent, causing firestorms and a subsequent cooling of the climate that might last for years. But even something the size of Dimorphos, only 160 metres across, would do a lot of damage. Its impact would create an explosion equivalent to 400-600 megatonnes of TNT. By comparison, the Tunguska bolide that exploded over Siberia in 1908, flattening more than 2,000km2 of forest, released something like 20 megatonnes. And recently published evidence suggests that an explosion of similar size to Tunguska destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a city in the Jordan valley, in about 1650BC.
There are, moreover, a lot of unknown asteroids out there. NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Programme, intended to discover 90% of asteroids larger than 140 metres across that have orbits near Earth’s, is reckoned to have so far found less than half of them. None yet located is seen as a threat. But if such a threat were identified, the question would be whether anything could be done about it.
If collision with Earth was imminent, the answer is probably “no”. But if it were years or decades away, a nudge of the sort DART will give Dimorphos could change a space rock’s path enough for it to miss Earth after all—even a tiny alteration in such a body’s orbit will grow over time.
Dimorphos’s behaviour after DART hits it will thus be the subject of intense scrutiny. The impact itself will be monitored by LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging of Asteroids). This is a small craft, built by Italy’s space agency, which will be launched along with DART and separate from it shortly before impact. After that, Didymos and Dimorphos will be tracked by ground-based telescopes. Then, in 2024, the European Space Agency will launch a follow-up craft called Hera that will arrive at the double asteroid in 2026, for a more detailed inspection. All these data will then be crunched to find out just how feasible an asteroid-deflection mission would be.
With luck, no such mission will ever be needed. But if one is, DART may prove to be the most important space probe ever to have flown.
This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Nudge, nudge"
The launch of an exploration of Earth’s defences
It will check how far it is possible to deflect an incoming asteroid