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posted by janrinok on Monday March 19 2018, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the nuke-it-from-orbit dept.

There's no need to freak out yet, however. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration are on the case, and they're thinking about wielding a big Hammer.

Hammer stands for "Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response," which is an impressive name all on its own. Hammer's a concept at the moment, but if built, it would be a 30-foot-tall (9 meter), 8.8-ton spacecraft that could act as either an asteroid battering ram or as a delivery vehicle for a nuclear device. Let's call it the "nudge or nuke" option.  

Bennu is a beast, according to the national lab. It's 1,664 times as heavy as the Titanic and measures more than five football fields in diameter. If it hit Earth, the impact would unleash 80,000 times the energy of the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945. It would be devastating.

Hammer is designed to launch using NASA's Delta IV Heavy rocket. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore published a paper in the journal Acta Astronautica in February that evaluates the options for using the spacecraft to successfully encourage Bennu to redirect from Earth.

The researchers say ramming the asteroid to change its course would be ideal, but it would need to be a "gentle nudge" that doesn't cause it to break up. It's a complicated proposition. 

The team looked at a variety of scenarios. For example, if Earth started launching Hammer missions just 10 years before impact, "it was determined that it could take between 34 and 53 launches of the Delta IV Heavy rocket, each carrying a single Hammer impactor, to make a Bennu-class asteroid miss the Earth," the lab reported on Thursday.

All of this makes it sound like a gentle nudge might not be the best solution for big asteroids. 


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @02:32PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday March 19 2018, @02:32PM (#654909) Journal

    You jest, but that's the way humanity should be handling asteroids at some point in the future. Divert them into safe, exploitable orbits whenever possible, and mine them.

    Technology needs to be improved before that can be realized, and something "impossible" like solar-powered EmDrive might be ideal for making slight alterations to asteroid orbits. It would be nice if they could be landed softly onto the Moon, Ceres, Mars, etc.

    Each asteroid that plunges into Jupiter or escapes our solar system is another big ball of resources lost to us forever.

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 19 2018, @05:42PM (3 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 19 2018, @05:42PM (#655022)

    Each asteroid that plunges into Jupiter or escapes our solar system is another big ball of resources lost to us forever.

    Yep. It's too bad we couldn't have captured, or at least landed a probe on, that big interstellar asteroid that came through our system a few months ago, to see what it was made of.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @05:55PM (2 children)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday March 19 2018, @05:55PM (#655033) Journal

      Research indicated that as many as millions of interstellar asteroids enter and exit the solar system every year:

      https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=18/01/06/0747243 [soylentnews.org]

      Glass half empty view is that many valuable rocks are leaving at this very moment and we can't stop it or even see most of it. Glass half full, we have a chance to slightly replenish our solar system's usable mass in the future without needing to travel to another star.

      We can't reliably redirect normal asteroids yet, so it's no surprise we can't deal with a new class of high relative velocity asteroids. A mission to 'Oumuamua may not be entirely ruled out, however:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Hypothetical_space_missions [wikipedia.org]

      ʻOumuamua is traveling too fast for any existing spacecraft to reach.[64] The Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) has launched Project Lyra for assessing the feasibility of a mission to ʻOumuamua.[65] Several options for sending a spacecraft to ʻOumuamua within a time-frame of 5 to 10 years were suggested. One option is using first a Jupiter flyby followed by a close solar flyby at 3 solar radii (2.1×10^6 km; 1.3×10^6 mi) in order to take advantage of the Oberth effect.[34] More advanced options of using solar, laser electric, and laser sail propulsion, based on Breakthrough Starshot technology, have also been considered. The challenge is to get to the asteroid in a reasonable amount of time (and so at a reasonable distance from Earth), and yet be able to gain useful scientific information. To do this, decelerating the spacecraft at 'Oumuamua would be "highly desirable, due to the minimal science return from a hyper-velocity encounter".[34] If the investigative craft goes too fast, it would not be able to get into orbit or land on the asteroid and would fly past it. The authors conclude that, although challenging, an encounter mission would be feasible using near-term technology.[34][65] Astronomers estimate that several interstellar objects similar to ʻOumuamua pass inside the orbit of Earth each year,[42] and 10,000 are passing inside the orbit of Neptune on any given day.[66] If correct, this provides possible opportunities for future studies of interstellar objects, although with the current space technology, close visits and orbital missions are impossible due to their high speeds.

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      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 19 2018, @08:10PM (1 child)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday March 19 2018, @08:10PM (#655101)

        SN really needs a way of letting you cut-and-paste Wikipedia text, but automatically cutting out the citation numbers.

        From your link, though, I really question the wisdom of such a mission. By the time they get it together, 'Oumuamua is going to be very far away (it's already far away!), so you'd need a really fast craft to catch up to it in any reasonable time, and by the time you do, how good will the radio link be at that distance? It's already traveling significantly faster than any of our other extra-solar-bound probes. The article says that several similar objects likely pass within Earth's orbit every year (and 10,000 within the orbit of Neptune every day!), so it seems like there will probably be easier candidates to send a mission to.

        • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 19 2018, @09:09PM

          by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday March 19 2018, @09:09PM (#655129) Journal

          SN really needs a way of letting you cut-and-paste Wikipedia text, but automatically cutting out the citation numbers.

          It can be done with my extension by editing a macro to use the regular expression "/\[[0-9]+\]/gi" and replace with nothing. Then you select the paragraph and hit the button.

          The test was successful.

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