February 15, 2013 - 2:01 pm
Flyby near miss, crash in Russia, crash in Cuba, all in one week — two in one day. It’s time to get serious about asteroid defense.
Astronomers have been sounding the warning on near-earth objects for about 20 or 30 years now. They think that there are about 1,000 that pose a threat, but this week’s events show that our understanding is very incomplete. And the sad truth is, we don’t even have a manned space flight program anymore.
Why can’t we just leave Earth’s defense up to the Russians? They still have a space program. And the Chinese, North Koreans and Iranians are all working hard on their space programs, let them defend us from the cosmos. /sarc
A space program is good, but it’s better if you spread it around the world. Right?
That’s a fait accompli.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundia. Oh well.
No, it’s Friday, not Mundai.
– world go away.
Do you think we have a way to deflect or destroy an asteroid? I don’t think we do. Even our strongest nuclear warhead can’t produce more than a 1,000 megatons of energy and that’s being generous. I don’t even think that that amount of mass would be enough to knock an asteroid off its course or split it in half.
I’ve seen a very interesting proposal to maneuver an unmanned spacecraft near an asteroid, then fire low-powered ion thrusters. These can run continuously for long periods of time.
The spacecraft would be gravitationally bound to the asteroid, so it could “tow” the asteroid without even touching it.
If found early enough, it would only take a tiny nudge to prevent the asteroid from hitting Earth.