U.S. Congress is dealing with Killer Asteroids
- Thread starter Mjr. Whoopass
- Start date
- Status
Jason_Ryock
Vice Admiral
These are all just lies that Hollywood has told us anyway!
Mjr. Whoopass
<FONT color=lightblue><B>I was going to say someth
That thesis couldn't be any more convenient for this thread! Do tell... What's the solution? Anything else interesting to add?
Basically, you hit the asteroid with an interceptor spacecraft. A warhead is neither necessary nor a good idea - a nuclear explosion risks breaking the asteroid into pieces. Then instead of a rifle bullet coming at you, you have a shotgun blast. Sure, each smaller piece would do less damage, but the likelihood of being hit increases.
The method I used was to take a spacecraft of reasonable mass (25 metric tons in low earth orbit including fuel, which is a reasonable launch mass for the Boeing Delta IV Heavy), and smack it into the asteroid. The spacecraft uses the hydrogen-oxygen upper stage motor of the Delta IV to leave low earth orbit, and then uses a cluster of ion engines (I assumed the use of the engines currently in use on the Dawn asteroid probe) to travel to the asteroid. The challenge is to navigate the spacecraft such that upon impact, it changes the asteroid's course so that it misses Earth as much as possible. Basically it is a continuous thrust optimization problem, where you have a spacecraft with a relatively weak engine that can fire for months at a time. Generally you want to get from point A to point B and maximize some objective function. Usually you want to maximize the final mass of the spacecraft, so basically you'd be trying to use as little fuel as possible so that you can carry a larger science payload. In this case, the thing you want to maximize is the distance by which the asteroid misses the Earth.
I would love to post it, but I can't figure out how/where. I've uploaded to my university storage space, but I'm not sure that one can access it from outside the university network.
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jenglan3/www/Englander MS Thesis FINAL.pdf
If that doesn't work, I'd be happy to email it to someone to host elsewhere.
The method I used was to take a spacecraft of reasonable mass (25 metric tons in low earth orbit including fuel, which is a reasonable launch mass for the Boeing Delta IV Heavy), and smack it into the asteroid. The spacecraft uses the hydrogen-oxygen upper stage motor of the Delta IV to leave low earth orbit, and then uses a cluster of ion engines (I assumed the use of the engines currently in use on the Dawn asteroid probe) to travel to the asteroid. The challenge is to navigate the spacecraft such that upon impact, it changes the asteroid's course so that it misses Earth as much as possible. Basically it is a continuous thrust optimization problem, where you have a spacecraft with a relatively weak engine that can fire for months at a time. Generally you want to get from point A to point B and maximize some objective function. Usually you want to maximize the final mass of the spacecraft, so basically you'd be trying to use as little fuel as possible so that you can carry a larger science payload. In this case, the thing you want to maximize is the distance by which the asteroid misses the Earth.
I would love to post it, but I can't figure out how/where. I've uploaded to my university storage space, but I'm not sure that one can access it from outside the university network.
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/jenglan3/www/Englander MS Thesis FINAL.pdf
If that doesn't work, I'd be happy to email it to someone to host elsewhere.
McGruff
Banned
Nobody can possibly know what those actual odds would be, but one can take a semi-educated guess and come to the conclusion that they are very very bad in the long run. Considering the stupid, greedy, violent, shortsighted traits that manifest themselves so often in the predatory animals that we happened to evolve into, it's entirely likely that we will do ourselves in as a species at some point even if some cataclysmic natural event doesn't do it first. Do you personally believe that mankind will be around in 10,000 years? In 100,000? In 1,000,000? In 10,000,000?
Now here's an area of physics that I know nothing about but find entirely interesting. Would the 25 ton spacecraft really be able to affect, say an 80 mile across chunk of iron going thousands of miles per hour?
Not an 80 mile one, no. Fortunately Apophis is only about 300 meters wide....but if it hit the Earth, it would release energy equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT!
There isn't much we could do if something the size of the one that may have killed the dinosaurs, about 10 kilometers wide, turned up. Fortunately they are very rare. The "most threatening" ones, which basically means the ones that are big enough to do some damage and common enough that we might actually run into one, can definitely be affected by a 25 ton spacecraft. You need to hit it a few years in advance though. The real challenge is in detecting these beasts early enough.
There isn't much we could do if something the size of the one that may have killed the dinosaurs, about 10 kilometers wide, turned up. Fortunately they are very rare. The "most threatening" ones, which basically means the ones that are big enough to do some damage and common enough that we might actually run into one, can definitely be affected by a 25 ton spacecraft. You need to hit it a few years in advance though. The real challenge is in detecting these beasts early enough.
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
I don't see any reason to assume mankind will destroy itself. It's always possible - anything's possible - but as far as probability is concerned, all you've really got to consider is mankind's track record. And that track record indicates that, well, mankind has never destroyed itself. Again, that doesn't mean it can't do so in the future, but it does mean that any talk about the inevitability of such an event is completely unjustified.
McGruff
Banned
Just off the top of my head, our track record in only the last 100 years has been a nonnuclear world war, a barely nuclear world war, the appearance of AIDS, a Cuban missile crisis, and a superflu that killed literally tens of millions of young healthy adults in developed countries in only a few years. I think it is very safe to assume that mankind will destroy itself sooner or later, or hopefully much later.
Sheesh, the news media already had me paralyzed to the point of barely being able to live my life, what with the fear of being killed by an asteroid that might hit earth long after I'm dead. Now I really AM paralyzed and am pulling a Stephen Hawking just to write this!
Those are quite the math skills you worked out there McGruff. Everyone else is being sarcastic or ridiculing you, but I have the complete and total confidence that you sat down one night and worked and worked at the figures until you perfectly simulated the earth, down to each individual person (take THAT Hari Seldon) and crunched the numbers until SOMETHING came out of nowhere and eradicated the entire species.
My only question here would be what your methods were and what it was that eventually resulted in us being wiped out, and why you aren't releasing these figures to the scientific community. Is it because you'll change the future beyond hope of repair and you'd just have to rework all your figures?
That's right kids. As one of the ten Christian pricks that use the internet, I'm here to tell you that homosexuality is indeed the cause of all the problems of the universe and that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. I'm actually crazy enough to believe myself when I say that homosexuality is the reason your house lit on fire last weekend! Oh, and Jack Thompson and Jack Chick are totally sane men who are never wrong. Wait, what?
Which would be a 100% miss, right? Either the asteroid hits the earth, or it misses it, it doesn't just kinda graze it and take out a tree or two. Interesting way of solving it nonetheless.
Except for McGruff's computer simulations.
Wait, then how DID you crunch all those numbers that guarantee 100% that we're going to die? (Granted he was talking about much bigger rocks, but let's ignore context here for the sake of joke. Please? Screw context.)
Other safe assumptions for the new generation:
-Mankind is not meant to fly, if he was he'd be given wings. Screw your airplane ideas.
-Bad blood causes sickness, so leeching is an awesome way to cure disease.
-A cybernetic 9/11 will cause horrible disasters as Al-Qaeda terrorist hackers cause network outages and the like using the SCADA equipment in your car as a wireless signal tracking point with which to do much damage. Stuff an ordinary ice storm can do, and better, but if terrorist hackers do it we're doomed!
-If you don't all send on this message to EVERYONE in your address book within 3 hours you'll wind up dead by the side of the road in a grisly, unlikely accident.
-If you DO send on this message you'll become a multi-quadrillionaire and live forever in an incredible new body with sculpted abs, and gain magical psychic powers!
Quarto
Unknown Enemy
I wouldn't go there, if I were you - I happen to be a Christian prick, and if you want, I'm quite happy to take up the argument regarding the unproportionally large and overwhelmingly negative impact of homosexuality (or more specifically, homosexuals - and not all of them, but a small group amongst them) on society. And I'm quite willing to bet that while my Christian-prickish arguments are gonna be rational, all you'll have to hold up against them will be some irrational nonsense about how I need to get with the times and learn to think for myself et cetera.
Such a discussion, though, is not likely to end in a good way, though, so it may be better to leave it alone
.
- Status