BakaBT
Discussion Forums => General Discussions => Topic started by: 1000mAh on March 04, 2012, 07:02:09 AM
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http://www.thetruthbehindthescenes.org/2012/03/04/deadly-asteroid-2012-da14-bounds-towards-earth-out-of-the-blue/
Blast it or paint it: Deadly asteroid bounds towards Earth out of the blue
To avert a new apocalypse – this time set for February 2013 – scientists suggest confronting asteroid 2012 DA14 with either paint, or big guns. The tough part of either scheme is that time has long run out to build a spaceship for any operation.
NASA confirms the 60-meter (197-feet) asteroid, spotted by Spanish stargazers in February, has a good chance of colliding with Earth in eleven months.
The rocks closest approach to the planet is scheduled for February 15, 2013, when the distance between the planet and space wanderer will be under 27,000 km (16,700 miles). This is lower than the geosynchronous orbit kept by the Google Maps satellite.
Fireworks and watercolors
With the asteroid zooming that low, it will be too late to do anything with it besides trying to predict its final destination and the consequences of impact.
A spaceship is needed, experts agree. It could shoot the rock down or just crash into it, either breaking the asteroid into debris or throwing it off course.
“We could paint it,” says NASA expert David Dunham.
Paint would affect the asteroid’s ability to reflect sunlight, changing its temperature and altering its spin. The asteroid would stalk off its current course, but this could also make the boulder even more dangerous when it comes back in 2056, Aleksandr Devaytkin, the head of the observatory in Russia’s Pulkovo, told Izvestia.
Spaceship impossible?
Whatever the mission, building a spaceship to deal with 2012 DA14 will take two years – at least.
The asteroid has proven a bitter discovery. It has been circling in orbit for three years already, crossing Earth’s path several times, says space analyst Sergey Naroenkov from the Russian Academy of Sciences. It seems that spotting danger from outer space is still the area where mere chance reigns, while asteroid defense systems exist only in drafts.
Still, prospects of meeting 2012 DA14 are not all doom and gloom.
“The asteroid may split into pieces entering the atmosphere. In this case, most part of it will never reach the planet’s surface,” remarks Dunham.
But if the entire asteroid is to crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia. This is almost the size of Luxembourg. In today’s case, the destination of the asteroid is yet to be determined.
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2012+DA14&orb=1
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2012da14.html
found sumthing liek this :P any comments? true or false? How bad would this be?
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Looks real enough to me. The consequences are outlined, so doesn't that give you enough of an idea of how bad it could be?
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Looks real enough to me. The consequences are outlined, so doesn't that give you enough of an idea of how bad it could be?
well, "But if the entire asteroid is to crash into the planet, the impact will be as hard as in the Tunguska blast, which in 1908 knocked down trees over a total area of 2,150 sq km (830 sq miles) in Siberia. This is almost the size of Luxembourg. In today’s case, the destination of the asteroid is yet to be determined."
lets hope it hits south pole
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Knock the US out, Woohoo, more specifically, Wall Street.
Or 2nd best choice, Israel.
Back to serious mode.
If painting it will bring it back at 2056, that's a better idea than shooting it with a multi-billion dollar projectile, being it a spaceship or whatever that fits, and by then we would've come up with a better solution.
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Back to serious mode.
If painting it will bring it back at 2056, that's a better idea than shooting it with a multi-billion dollar projectile, being it a spaceship or whatever that fits, and by then we would've come up with a better solution.
yeah, but when it would come back, it would be even more dangerous.
"Paint would affect the asteroid’s ability to reflect sunlight, changing its temperature and altering its spin. The asteroid would stalk off its current course, but this could also make the boulder even more dangerous when it comes back in 2056"
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Back to serious mode.
If painting it will bring it back at 2056, that's a better idea than shooting it with a multi-billion dollar projectile, being it a spaceship or whatever that fits, and by then we would've come up with a better solution.
yeah, but when it would come back, it would be even more dangerous.
"Paint would affect the asteroid’s ability to reflect sunlight, changing its temperature and altering its spin. The asteroid would stalk off its current course, but this could also make the boulder even more dangerous when it comes back in 2056"
it would be "possibly more dangerous" because the next pass would be unknown, and by unknown it could come no way near earth, or have a more spot on trajectory, they just stated "possibly more dangerous" to make it sound more interesting.
Of course with a 40 year heads up not only will new tech be available, but the "spaceship to shoot it down that will take 2 years to build" would have plenty of time to be made.
Most people see stuff like this and only register the parts that read "new apocalypse" "colliding with Earth" "doom and gloom" etc. and start shitting themselves instead of actually thinking about what they've read, imo 10 months from now NASA is gonna release a thing saying "oh btw, that whole asteroid thing, yeah that was a mistake, our bad"
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^ just posted this here since I found it xD and to be honest, I was smiling after I finished reading :D
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Well they'll figure it out somehow, and if it is going to plant itself somewhere in the US, you think they would want to let everybody know?
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How bad would this be?
Meteor Crater, Arizona (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater)
Everything within ~20 miles radius would be incinerated to the ground. There would be "a lot" of damage out to ~50 miles, in addition to general atmospheric disruption that would be "noticed" for several years. There are a number of factors that could change it, but that's a fair base to begin estimates.
The Tunguska event is not a very good example. Tunguska is not actually very well-defined as to what precisely happened. We don't know the size or composition of whatever that thing was, and it exploded at fairly high altitude. It was likely a comet fragment, for one strong possibility, mostly composed of ice and dust, so it broke apart and blew up easily. However, Tunguska was a very trivial hit ... so, the damage you see there is a fraction of what this beast is capable of.
The composition of 2012 DA14 is very important. If it is "only" solid rock and it hits on land, it's likely to be about one half the problem Meteor Crater suggests. Rock has a higher tendency to break up on entry, and presents less kinetic energy at the same velocity.
If it is a solid 60 meter hunk of iron-nickle, and it's traveling at similar velocity, it will reach the ground in one piece and it will be ... impressive.
After that, the location of the strike will be very important. There is a huge amount of remote land on the Earth, so the chances of coming down on or near a city are statistically low. In fact, it is much more likely to come down in an ocean, which presents its own problems.
If it punches down into deep water fairly close to land, there could be a 100 meter tsunami, or more, just for imagination. Gulf of Mexico, North Sea, Mediterranean, Bay of Bengal, South China Sea, for examples, would be particularly devastating. Better if it lands in the center of the Pacific, where it will generate large tsunami, but spread out over a very large area and most locales would survive with fairly low waves. Suck to live in Hawaii, but Japan & California probably wouldn't see much worse than the tsunami that hit Japan last year, maybe even less.
Anyway. There's a lot of possibility to speculate here. Will it hit? Will it be a direct hit? Where will it hit? What is its composition? What is its structure? What is its mass? What is its exact velocity (relative to the Earth)? Need to know a few more of those things.
And:
A spaceship [...] could shoot the rock down
This is just fucking retarded. NO: there is no "shooting it down." I fucking hate ignorant retards in the morning trying to sound like they have a fucking clue. Hollywood movies ≠ science or reality.
Probably our best option is to start building a robot ship to catch it after it passes us, attach itself, and apply thrust to push it out of near Earth orbit so that it doesn't bother us in the future.
If this thing is scheduled to hit us, it's already too late. Nothing we have will reach it before it gets here. If, somehow, we can send a couple of exceptionally large nukes to it, or a couple of very massive blocks of mass to collide with it first, we might be able to break it into pieces so that it doesn't hit as one, monolithic chunk. The pieces will all still follow the same trajectory and will still hit, but they will be smaller and a larger percentage will burn up in the atmosphere (vastly increase the surface area exposed to atmospheric drag). The total kinetic energy that reaches the surface will be smaller and more distributed, so localized damage will be reduced.
However, if it is a solid chunk of iron-nickle, it's gonna be a motherfucker to break up. Rock will shatter much more easily. Solid metal ... we will require very perfect targeting with very large application of energy. Kinetic energy impact will have far more effect than nukes. Multiple-ton slugs of depleted uranium are probably one of the best options. Say, if possible, hit it five or ten times in a row with 20-ton slugs of something, moving as fast as we can accelerate it before impact.
Don't believe me? Place a firecracker on the surface of a bowling ball and try to make it move or shatter.
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^ I'm not THAT bad with physics :P
I just never really checked out of things out of my are of interest = anime :P
but that really tells a lot, that post of yours, so I thank you.
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Am I the only one who thinks it'd be a good idea to load up a nuclear payload (or just a lot of heavy shit) on one of NASA's old retired shuttles and launch that at it? Screw spending two years building a new ship just to destroy it (or, at least, lose it forever, same result). We have these 30-year-old hunks of metal that we probably will never use anymore out of safety concerns.
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The problem is: "just launching" anything takes 4 to 6 months minimum, assuming you have all the rockets and parts and everything all on-hand and ready to go. Most launches are 18-24 month preparations. And then it will take months to reach it. Approximate best-case scenario, we might reach it with something in ~7-8 months, leaving virtually no window of opportunity to do anything effective before it arrives.
Granted, in an emergency like this, a lot of corners can be cut ... which vastly increase the chances of a FAILed launch. Internationally, there's something like a 5% FAIL rate for everything that is attempted, and that's with full preparation and no rushed schedules. The FAIL rate for human-occupied vehicles is so much lower due to so much extra care being put into them.
Anyway, as per your suggestion, it isn't necessary to send a shuttle. It would be pretty inefficient, unless it needed to be a suicide mission for some reason and carry humans to the target. The amount of mass that would be required by including a shuttle is better/more efficiently dedicated to directly useful tech & payload.
"All" that's really necessary for an unmanned/robotic mission is a massive launch vehicle, of which there are probably less than five under construction at the moment worldwide. Might be another dozen smaller ones under construction &/or near completion, but nothing like the large lifters required to put 20 or 30 tons into orbit.
Then the real issue comes up: all these designs are just to get into relatively low-Earth orbit. There is effectively nothing available to move something as far away as the moon right now. Tons of fuel would need to be lifted up out of Earth's gravity well for some form of propulsion to have available to consume for a trip to the moon. If we put a 20 ton something into orbit, how is it going to be accelerated and guided to the target?
This asteroid is millions upon millions of miles out. Not only will something have to get there ... fast ... it needs to get there with some form of precision and either hit it perfectly (try timing a nuke explosion for the instant of contact at 50 or 100 KM/sec), or attempt to match its trajectory.
Not knowing any other details at the moment, I'll suggest that a 20 or 30 ton slug of depleted uranium tipped with a very hardened perpetrator (half-ton titanium or titanium alloy). Try to generate an impact at 50 KM/sec or greater. Much greater is all the better, if possible. The DU slug will ignite and give us the "best" bang for our buck ... far more energy released than a tactical nuke, in addition to it's raw mass. Anything that detonates on the surface will have greatly reduced effect ... there is no atmosphere helping to compress the explosion to the surface (thus why a tactical nuke is almost useless). A DU slug that actually gets beneath the surface by even a few meters stands a chance of a focused energy release ... both for deflection velocity and (possibly) enough of a "shaped charge" to split or shatter the object.
Matching it's trajectory isn't an option in the window available with our current tech. For a very low mass probe we might be able to pull it off. That's why I suggested in the previous post that we plan to make something to catch it after it passes ... with the very likely hope that it will miss. Then it can be tagged with a transmitter and get it painted for extremely precise tracking and other statistics (such as exact spin & tumble, very critical information we need). Maybe even a small rocket with limited fuel can be attached with a robotic controller that can slow or stop it's spin & tumble ... making it far easier for a deflection attempt later on.
Let's imagine that we actually know it will hit, let's say at greater than 75% accuracy. And, we overcome political issues and get the major world players behind this immediately. I will estimate that under 100% optimal conditions, technically we might be able to launch one or two vehicles in 4 months. One should be small and fast and get there to capture detailed data, which would be used to update the arrival of the second. The second should probably be a very large mass/kinetic impact device, designed to hit with the maximum velocity with the maximum mass we can can manage.
A 20 ton impact device would be similar to shooting a bowling ball with a BB gun ... one perfect shot ... and hoping to deflect it enough to generate a miss. This is operating under the assumption it is a monolithic iron-nickle mass. If it's rock, then consideration to "shattering" might be a possible option. By "shattering," maybe breaking it into three or ten large pieces, which would still likely hit, but increased surface area would burn off more during entry through the atmosphere and the impacts would be slightly spread out and do less overall damage.
Deflection needs to happen as soon as possible. The further out it is, the more deflection can be generated by the time it arrives.
If it is impacted four months before it arrives here, chances are we can't generate more than 1,000 miles or so trajectory change (again, assuming PERFECT conditions and strike). That could be all the difference, or maybe not.
But, I don't think we have any technology that will reach it that fast (for impact, rather than data collection). Which means a possible deflection event might only be possible two months out ... which will make virtually no difference.
Summary: If this thing is lined up for a direct impact, we're already screwed. It is a very survivable event from a physical science standpoint. However, politically .... I weep for humanity. Crazy like you have never imagined will consume humanity if this will hit. Once we determine where it will hit .... the affected regions will come unglued, and the (relatively) "unaffected" regions are more likely than not to create an Armageddon just for the fucking lulz.
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It's not hitting us, folks.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/04/no-asteroid-2012-da14-will-not-hit-us-next-year/
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It's not hitting us, folks.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/04/no-asteroid-2012-da14-will-not-hit-us-next-year/
How much do you bet that people will spend the next years yelling how scientists are liar and it really is gonna hit us and we are all gonna die?
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It's not hitting us, folks.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/04/no-asteroid-2012-da14-will-not-hit-us-next-year/
:'( me not gonna see a nasteroid blowing US? sigh...
at least we get something really nice to look at in 2013.
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if it's that close, will there be some side effects?
like funked up gravity causing tsunamis and volcanic eruptions?
or will it just pass by like nothing happened?
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if it's that close, will there be some side effects?
like funked up gravity causing tsunamis and volcanic eruptions?
or will it just pass by like nothing happened?
It only weight 1.2e+08 kg (120,000 tons). I wouldn't worry about that.
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actually, I was hoping something would happen...
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Well I read somewhere that it might come back in 2036 or 2056 so you might get lucky then :P. But by then we are able to shoot deflect it I guess. IF it does hit somewhere then it could have a 200 megaton destructive force. But on another site I read it would only be 1 megaton... quiet some difference..
But where is the one that is supposed to bring us the real 2012... Did we watch all those 2012 movies for nothing...
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2036 is not this one. This one is a pebble compared to Apophis.
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Ah so there are multiple ones... That explains the different data :laugh:
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It's not hitting us, folks.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/03/04/no-asteroid-2012-da14-will-not-hit-us-next-year/
Interesting. What's the margin of error on that 27000 km?