Russia Today reports
Russian scientists believe that, at the present time, a nuclear explosion set off close to a dangerous asteroid remains the most effective means to change its trajectory, and thus escape the impact, TASS news agency reported on Saturday.
"In this case a nuclear blast is conducted in such a way that the asteroid does not disintegrate into smaller pieces," explain Russian space experts. The explosion would force the ejection of material from the space body's surface, creating sufficient thrust to affect its trajectory and sidetrack it to a safe orbit.
Four Nebosvod-S (Welkin) satellites will be commissioned to monitor near-Earth space threats. Two of them will be planetary sentries on a circumterrestrial orbit and two others will be delivered to Earth's circumsolar orbit.
The satellites will be capable of spotting space objects measuring several meters across.
What are the chances we will see a live test any time soon? How about delivering an asteroid for mining?
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday January 17 2016, @11:03PM
Delivering it where? Nuking it into a low earth orbit? Better hope they don't mix yards and metres up and end up landing it in red square!
(Score: 4, Touché) by jimshatt on Monday January 18 2016, @12:31AM
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 18 2016, @06:44PM
NASA uses metric too.
The problem is when they get data from American defense contractors.
So let's make sure the Russians don't get any data from Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday January 18 2016, @01:28AM
Eh? The are talking about delivering satellites to monitor incoming asteroids, what's your reference about nuking about?
(Score: 3, Touché) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @01:34AM
Maybe read the summary?
Nah, what was I thinking.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by arslan on Monday January 18 2016, @03:55AM
I did, did you? TFS talks about delivering satellites, not nukes. They'll monitor and maybe nuke the asteroids from the satellites. They are delivering as in transporting satellites with nukes in them to orbit, not delivering as in launching nukes to orbit which is what you made it sound like... or at least to me..
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @06:17AM
The satellites are only to monitor. Not to host nukes.
Those would be launched from earth.
The Idea of satellites to monitor is not new, and the US has at least one already on orbit. Nobody proposes putting nukes on satellites because for this deflection plan to work you need launch months in advance, and attempt your diversion far from earth orbit.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday January 18 2016, @12:17PM
I did, did you?
The summary included these two lines
Hence my statement
"Delivering it where?" - in response to the editor's "delivering an asteroid for mining" question (#2)
"Nuking it into a low earth orbit?" - in response to the assertion that nuking an asteroid will change it's trajectory (#1)
"Better hope they don't mix yards and metres up and end up landing it in red square!" - in reference to the famous Mars Climate Orbiter fuckup [cnn.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by mhajicek on Monday January 18 2016, @12:05AM
Yes, our nuclear missile satellites are purely for peaceful, humanitarian purposes.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @02:05AM
Well it is interesting that nuking asteroids or comets or other large rocks has met a steady drumbeat of negativism from western sources on recent years.
Some just arbitrarily call it a Bad Idea [universetoday.com]. Others insist it wouldn't work [pbs.org] and still others think its some sort of secret conspiracy plot [motherjones.com]
Even the much vaunted MICHIO KAKU [bigthink.com] gives at best a luke-warm nod toward the idea.
The idea is not so much to shatter an incoming rock, but simply to hit it early enough to slow it down (delay it).
Since the Earth is approximately 12,750 km in diameter and moves at approx. 30 km per second in its orbit, it travels a distance of one planetary diameter in about 425 seconds, or slightly over seven minutes.
So any method of taking a few minutes off of the arrival time, if done early enough is the proposed solution: The earth will supposedly be out of the way. Even if it breaks it up into many smaller pieces, all of them would be expected to miss.
However, there would be so much political angst over the idea that any action would likely be delayed until impact was unavoidable, with the resultant large death toll, or even an extinction event. And there's a certain segment of society (some here on SN) who would be just fine with that.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 18 2016, @04:28AM
We're just getting to the point where something like that would be feasible. It's only been in recent times that we could land a probe on an asteroid.
Granted we don't need to actually land the thing on what we want to blow up, but we do need to track the thing and get the charge on the correct part of the object and get it to detonate in a way that doesn't wipe out major cities.
In terms of actually doing something like this, There's a large amount of computation involved and the further out we go the more space has to be covered and the larger the margin for error is in terms of whether or not it's going to hit us. We don't really want to be nuking all sorts of asteroids needlessly, that could raise attention as well as be a waste of resources.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @06:26AM
Why are you worried about computation and error?
You do know we just few a spacecraft to Pluto, right? And you know it was launched a long time ago?
These are solved problems. Vikng 1 launched in 1975 and landed on mars in 76. Solved problems.
Energia could lift 5 or 6 independently target-able warheads at once.
And the idea is not to "blow them up" but simply to divert them (which for all practical purposes means simply slowing them ever so slightly while they are a long way away.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 18 2016, @02:59PM
Sending a probe to Pluto can't result in destroying the Earth. Sending a nuclear device into space to destroy something that's headed our way could easily wind up destroying all life as we know it if they fuck it up. Knock something that would have been a near miss into our path, destroy it after it's too close and pepper the surface with meteor rites. Or just split the thing into 2 pieces that then have to be dealt with.
Not to mention the calculations involved with figuring out which ones to target and which ones are going to go safely by.
Like I said we're getting close, but we're just not there. This is a hugely massive undertaking and we aren't likely to get a second chance if we fuck it up.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @10:43PM
Obviously you are not going to shoot at something that would clearly miss, by a wide margin.
But a "near miss" could also be devastating depending on the size of the object.
Our tracking capability is easily more than precise enough to determine hit/miss these days. Both the US and EU have landed spacecraft on tiny little things not even worthy of the title "asteroid".
Even if you split it in two, both halves can be tracked, and both halves will have their orbit changed. As i mentioned up-thread the amount you have to change it is very very small.
If you worry about misses, you send more than one warhead, spaced far enough apart that you have time to weigh the effects of the first one, and adjust your approach with the second one. Nuclear weapons don't weigh that much. Energia or SLS (when its ready) could lift 4 to 6 in one go.
Unless one arrives out of the blue, like the small one in Russia, we will have years to get ready. Which is why Russia wants to launch satellites to watch for the big ones that you have to hit far from the earth.
NASA's ATLAS: The Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System was to be ready last year, probably delayed, but they predict their system could offer a one-week warning and accurate impact site prediction for a 50-yard diameter asteroid, or "city killer," and three weeks for a 150-yard-diameter "county killer."
Its well within present capabilities.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Monday January 18 2016, @11:26PM
I think you greatly underestimate how much can go wrong if you don't get the calculations right or something unexpected happens. You're not going to get an equal sharing of the masses if you split the thing. You don't have any way of knowing ahead of time whether you're talking 50:50, 20:80 or 60:40 and how they're going to be oriented.
Probably the best thing to do would be to forget about breaking the thing and just design something to nudge the asteroid a few fractions of a degree and change the trajectory to keep it out of our orbit.
I don't doubt that we're getting close, but I do think that you're greatly underestimating the risk here. We don't have funding to have missiles at the ready in case we miss and missing means that we'd have to start the tracking and calculations over.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 19 2016, @01:56AM
Probably the best thing to do would be to forget about breaking the thing and just design something to nudge the asteroid a few fractions of a degree and change the trajectory to keep it out of our orbit.
Well, as I've posted above, the idea is NOT to break it up, but merely slow it down. Changing the orbit in anything besides the plane of the orbit takes way too much power. But you can slow it down or speed it up in the same plane by close
nuking rather than impacting with nukes.
Without air, a nuclear explosion above a rocky body just adds a bunch of heat. There is nothing to carry the shock wave. That alone can slow down the body.
There are lots of papers on line about this. It is fairly well studied.
But there have only been a couple impact tests (non nuclear). And mostly on soft comets.
Funding issues all go away instantly if there is a large body guaranteed to hit the earth in 2 years. There won't be a discussion, except from those who want to depopulate the earth to save the earth. (Some of those lurk here on SN).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday January 19 2016, @11:40AM
> Funding issues all go away instantly if there is a large body guaranteed to hit the earth in 2 years.
Don't be so sure: http://www.theonion.com/article/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obama-backed-bill-that--19025 [theonion.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 19 2016, @08:35PM
Did you just seriously introduce an Onion article into a rational discussion?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 21 2016, @12:52PM
Yup. The reason that Onion article is so funny is that it is so credible. You can bet that if a killeroid was discovered on a collision course, plenty of highly influential people would go into full-on denial mode (It's all a liberal conspiracy / God wouldn't do that to us/ I don't believe in space / I don't care coz I'm old and dying anyway) and resist efforts to save the world for the sake of chasing money & power right up until the sky turned black. It's pretty much what's happening right now with global warming.
Others would be investigating how they could get themselves up into orbit where they could fully enjoy the view of all those poor people being vaporised.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 18 2016, @05:07AM
The question is, what is the most effective measure?
Is it Bruce Willis planting the bomb? How about painting the rock white to reflect solar energy? Or lodging ion engines into it and engaging in a "slow burn".
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @06:27AM
Before I answer, how much time do we have? How far away do we detect it?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday January 18 2016, @06:54AM
The way I hear it told, a pretty long time. The biggest asteroids are the easiest to spot, and the least likely to strike.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risks/ [nasa.gov]
Check out #1 in the first list. Palermo scale value of -1.42. The scale combines risk of hitting and size. Less than -2 is nil threat, -2 to 0 is slight threat, positive values are bad. Potential impact date: 2880. Probability: 0.00012.
#1 in the second list. Palermo: -0.40. Impact between 2185-2196, probability 0.0029.
If that's the worst of the worst, I think we have some time. Most of the undiscovered asteroids will be smaller, so lower Palermo values.
I guess the worst unknown would be an asteroid with a highly irregular orbit (up to tens of thousands of AUs away from the Sun) or some object not orbiting the Sun at all.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 18 2016, @06:55PM
That's not true at all. There's lots of asteroids we haven't detected yet, and we've had several cases of good-sized asteroids flying right by us without us noticing until *after* they had already gone by. We aren't investing much effort into detecting and tracking asteroids, and we can't see ones which are in particular orbits relative to us and the Sun (which is why we have big ones flying right by us unnoticed until it's too late). We can't see them if they're between us and the Sun.
That list you cite is a list of ones which we've actually detected and catalogued. It doesn't have the unknown ones. So it's entirely possible a big one could be threatening us in the near term and we simply don't know about it.
Has everyone completely forgotten that Russia was actually HIT by an asteroid a couple years ago? No one saw that one coming either, and 1000 people were injured by it (of course, it wasn't a city-killer size one either). No wonder they're worried about impactors.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday January 18 2016, @08:32PM
The bigger the asteroid, the bigger the threat, but the less likely it is to go undetected.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday January 18 2016, @05:20PM
Putting the nuke inside the asteroid so that a good chunk gets ejected, moving the rest just a bit in the opposite direction.
Considering the lack of -well anything- in space, shockwave propagation is pretty dismal, so blowing a nuke near the side of an asteroid means hitting it with a lot of light, radiation, heat, and a few kilos of high-speed molten radioactive matter. Anything actually threatening wouldn't notice much.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 18 2016, @05:43AM
I'm not saying a nuke couldn't be used for the course correction of a threatening object, just that this could be used as an excuse for nuclear proliferation.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @06:33AM
Right, because Norway and Uruguay are bound to want their own asteroid interceptors.
Can't have that, so lets suffer 100 million dead rather than protect ourselves.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday January 18 2016, @06:28AM
If we can break it up into small enough pieces, they won't make it through the atmosphere, and we will get a somewhat radioactive meteor shower. A big one. Probably knock out every satellite we have in orbit, but, oh well.
The moon will probably look odd by today's standards for centuries until all the dust settles down. Wouldn't be surprised if it grows a set of rings like Saturn - rings of stirred up dust spiraling back inward after being launched outward by physical impacts of asteroid fragments on the surface. I would not expect the asteroid fragments to hit dead on with no tangential velocity.
Even if we succeeded in breaking it up, I am sure there will be environmental aftereffects that will change life on Earth as we know it. I would consider us quite fortunate if homo sapiens survives. My bet would be on the plants, microbes, cockroach, and the rat - given any life survives.
As far as the thrust or impact, we sure do not seem to be able to throw much of a punch by galactic standards, but like others say, if we can get our little jab in early enough, it will probably do the trick, kinda like a well-timed fart will make a golfer lose his shot.
The one really big thing we have going for us, is that by galactic standards, we are really tiny. My seat of the pants calculation of probability of trying to hit Earth from the asteroid belt would probably compare with hitting a fly in Moscow, shooting from Los Angeles ( with wind resistance, which would force p=0, thrown out ).
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @06:37AM
Even if we succeeded in breaking it up,
Again, the aim is not to break it up. Just slow it down or divert it ever so slightly while it is a long way from earth.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday January 18 2016, @07:53AM
I agree. Delaying it or diverting it is the best. By far.
Completely avoids the backscatter of dealing with all the fragments.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday January 19 2016, @04:45AM
If you break up a large asteroid and the debris enters, you can still get nuclear winter.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @12:48AM
Blowing up nukes next to an asteroid is a stupid plan, and only works if we detect it long before it will hit us. Blow up an asteroid and you just turn a shotgun slug into buckshot -- even more devastating over a larger area. Blow up a nuke next to an asteroid and nearly all of the energy does not hit the asteroid.
A better plan is a gravity tug if you have the time to get a nuke to nudge it once, then you can deflect it with another asteroid placed next to it with a solar sail or thrusters to maintain a gentle gravity tug and deflect its course.
If you just want an excuse to get nukes into space (as TFA implies), then a series of small shaped nuclear charges which make direct contact before exploding to maximize force applied and act as little nuclear rocket boosters for the rock is a much better application... However, small nukes are shit-tier for global thermonuclear war, see?
What we really need is to colonize the Asteroid belt. Hint: Chelyabinsk meteor was 20-30 times Hiroshima blast, good thing it didn't touch ground. The asteroid belt is basically chock full of a near limitless supply of nuke-scale weapons (rocks) that have the added benefit of not irradiating the place when they detonate. Nudge a rock = blow up a city or block an incoming rocket or take out a supply run. Plant a nuke on a lose rocky asteroid and detonate it as it reaches orbit: Orbital debris cloud.
Capturing some asteroids and setting up a small belt around the Earth to use the moon as a slingshot for them is a great idea, but everyone will literally be up in arms about who controls the rocks. Redirecting some space rocks to play billiards with other space rocks and save the planet is a bonus, but if you want advancement then we need to militarize the goals. Hint: We stopped going to the moon once the space program had perfected our ICBM engines.
TL;DR: TFA is "We need to save the Earth" propaganda to manufacture consent for weaponing space, but: He who rules the Asteroid Belt rules the Solar System.
(Score: 4, Funny) by PartTimeZombie on Monday January 18 2016, @02:01AM
+1 Interesting
+1 Informative
-1 Drug Use
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 18 2016, @02:02AM
He who rules the Asteroid Belt rules the Solar System.
Get yer ass back to ice mining, dang OPA terrist.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 18 2016, @02:09AM
then you can deflect it with another asteroid placed next to it with a solar sail
Ok, son, you train left the tracks right there, and the rest of what you said went downhill from there.
You should probably go to bed now.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday January 18 2016, @12:13PM
colonize the Asteroid belt.... Nudge a rock
I'm sure you know you're exaggerating, but nudging a rock in the asteroid belt will not cause it to impact Earth, you need a hell of a lot of delta-v
(Score: 1) by linkdude64 on Monday January 18 2016, @12:36PM
Can anybody more knowledgeable than myself about satellite construction enlighten me about whether or not the EMP would cause permanent damage? Are they shielded?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mth on Monday January 18 2016, @01:03PM
Satellites are shielded and use special chips more resistant to radiation, since with little to no atmosphere to protect them, they are vulnerable to a lot of radiation from space. But I don't know whether it's sufficient to protect them from an EMP. I expect it would depend on the distance between the explosion and the satellite, since the energy density on an expanding sphere would reduce quadratically with the radius.
I don't know much about nuclear physics, but a quick read [wikipedia.org] suggests that the worst part (E1) of the EMP that nuclear explosions cause on earth comes from their interaction with the atmosphere, so a nuclear explosion in space might be less devastating to electronics.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday January 18 2016, @07:02PM
Honestly, I'm really disappointed by the SN readership today. It seems that 75% of the readership here gets all its knowledge about space and asteroids from the movie "Armageddon". Idiots keep talking about "blowing up" asteroids, when that's Hollywood fantasy, and the article *summary* clearly discusses using nuclear weapons to simply change the trajectory of asteroids a bit.
The whole point of all this is to slightly alter an asteroids' trajectory so it misses the Earth. To do this, you have to use the nuke a pretty long time before it's forecast to hit the planet. That means the asteroid is not going to be anywhere even close to Earth; if it gets that close, you're too late. So you're probably talking about a mission to get the nuke to the asteroid at least a month in advance of the expected impact date. That far away, an EMP is not going to have any kind of effect on Earth-orbiting satellites, because (I should hope this would be obvious, but now I'm wondering) it would be so ridiculously far away.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 19 2016, @02:30PM
Why? The majority of the readership read the summary (possibly even the article), decided they could not add anything interesting or insightful to the discussion, and thus decided not to post anything. I cannot see anything wrong with that.
Now f you are disappointed by the posters, that's a whole different issue.