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from the fully-armed-and-operation-battle-station dept.
NASA's Brian Muirhead has speculated about the best way to construct a "Death Star" or other weaponized space station:
The best way to build a Death Star is to construct one out of an already-existing asteroid, says Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It could provide the metals," he says. "You have organic compounds, you have water—all the building blocks you would need to build your family Death Star."
And Muirhead knows a thing or two about asteroids. He's actually working on NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission, which will land on an asteroid, collect a piece, and then place it in orbit around the moon. A crewed mission will then go collect samples from that chunk while it's in orbit. (OK, so it's not quite building a Death Star, but it's still pretty cool.)
The Wired article includes a video.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday December 14 2015, @08:10PM
If the goal is to depopulate the planet, then you it would suffice to put the asteroid into a parabolic, or even hyperbolic, orbit with the closest approach well within the atmosphere. This should create a sonic boom loud enough to destory everything living on the planet. It MIGHT result in the asteroid being captured as a moon, but that's unlikely. If so, there would be repeated close encounters until the orbit either decayed or stabilized.
I don't, however, think that a close pass would suffice. (Someone else suggested that 6,000 close passes might suffice, but I have my doubts unless each one was precisely figured to change the orbit in the exact same direction.)
OTOH, a deep ocean strike by a much smaller asteroid would probably also suffice to destroy the ecosystem. The one the article in Analog figured was a five mile cube of nickle-iron. Larger than most astroids, but not larger than all of them. I think that the scenario figured that this would first raise the temperature by about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and then make it drop by a more than equal amount as vaproized steam formed into inpenetrable clouds. Something much smaller at the edge of the ocean sufficed to kill off the dinosaurs.
P.S.: The article was called "Giant Meteor Impact" by J.E. Enever. It was the cover story for the issue (March 1966). I no longer have access to that issue, so I may well have gotten some of his estimates wrong.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:09AM
Why go to all that trouble so that you can "reuse" the asteroid (guess how much energy you need to adjust the trajectory for a new target). Not like there aren't other asteroids to use for other targets. You probably use less energy for nonreusable extinction event asteroids than for a reusable strike.