To Ceres (1 Viewer)

[Exquisitor]

To Ceres:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...p&cvid=084f3bdde9c64965ac042832aa186f80&ei=12 Scientists say 1/3 mile wide asteroid impact 1 in 1,750 for 2182.

So, besides Bennu we should gather the resources to move Bennu before she arrives, in time to get on her and reshape her orbit.

A fueling station would work, it could catch up to an Asteroid, land on it and push it away.

The station could be loaded with a nuclear device if the fuel proved insufficient.

A station at Ceres could run an intercept, drop its bomb and then catch up with the asteroid.

 

[The Stars Tremble]

So we could launch a mission in five years to prevent the collision, but it would cost tens of billions of dollars.

Or we could wait until 2100 and with a massively greater space presence, flick this little rock out of the way with a laser or something.

I'm not seeing any urgency here.

 

[Exquisitor]

So we could launch a mission in five years to prevent the collision, but it would cost tens of billions of dollars.

Or we could wait until 2100 and with a massively greater space presence, flick this little rock out of the way with a laser or something.

I'm not seeing any urgency here.

At the rate we're going we wouldn't be able to move a 1/3 mile wide rock by 2182.

The keyhole is nearly fifty-years earlier so they would have six or eight chances to get in her.

The thing is orbital velocity is almost three times greater than the Earth's escape velocity, so you need over twice as much fuel as a launch just to catch up to the Asteroid.

No, I feel a sense of urgency, if Bennu goes through the keyhole, what then?

How do you get so much fuel into orbit, with your little space-x fueling station?

 

[dmpi]

Best case would be if we can perturb its orbit and cause it to miss the earth. Blowing it up might case more harm than good because multiple pieces would hit the earth causing widespread damage.

 

[The Stars Tremble]

At the rate we're going we wouldn't be able to move a 1/3 mile wide rock by 2182.

The keyhole is nearly fifty-years earlier so they would have six or eight chances to get in her.

The thing is orbital velocity is almost three times greater than the Earth's escape velocity, so you need over twice as much fuel as a launch just to catch up to the Asteroid.

No, I feel a sense of urgency, if Bennu goes through the keyhole, what then?

How do you get so much fuel into orbit, with your little space-x fueling station?

Focus a laser on one side of it, this would cause heating and expulsion of some of its mass, pushing it in the opposite direction. No need to actually travel to it. Only better lasers than we currently have.

I take the risk of asteroids seriously. But it's the ones we DON'T know about which worry me. Every dollar spent trying to counter Bennu is ten dollars taken from detection of unknown threats: it is FAR more urgent to map all the outer system objects, and get specific defenses in place, than to divert an object which MIGHT hit us more than a century from now.

We have the asteroid belt pretty well mapped. The next priority should be mapping the Kuiper Belt, and after that the Oort Cloud. We can do a lot of that with telescopes, and we will have better and better telescopes for many reasons besides asteroid detection.

Ultimately, if an alien species decides to take us out by throwing a big rock at us, at a significant percentage of the speed of light, there's not a damn thing we could do about it. The only bright side is that we would have only a few day's notice, or maybe even less.

 

[The Stars Tremble]

Best case would be if we can perturb its orbit and cause it to miss the earth. Blowing it up might case more harm than good because multiple pieces would hit the earth causing widespread damage.

Depends on how thoroughly we "blow it up." Small asteroids hit the atmosphere all the time, and don't cause any damage on the ground because they burn up in the atmosphere. A comprehensive blow it up strategy would break it into several pieces, then break the bigger pieces into smaller pieces, and most of the pieces of any size would actually miss the Earth. Any that hit, would mostly burn up AND there's some relation between impactor mass and consequences like tsunamis, which is favorable. I think it's square root, but I don't remember exactly.

If you could break one big asteroid neatly in two, both halves would then miss. Unless you did it at the last moment. But even then, it would be less disastrous than one big rock.

 

[What if...?]

I

So we could launch a mission in five years to prevent the collision, but it would cost tens of billions of dollars.

Or we could wait until 2100 and with a massively greater space presence, flick this little rock out of the way with a laser or something.

I'm not seeing any urgency here.

It wouldn’t be profitable, so it would likely not be dealt with until the last minute.

I won’t be here, so it’s not my problem.