On Oct 27, 3:54*pm, Brian Thorn wrote:
On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:25:29 -0700 (PDT), Hop
wrote:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...eadies-to-blas...

Sure hope Zubrin is wrong.

Well, kill off the Webb with its insatiable budget appetite, and that
will pay for all the other cuts.

No more Webbs and no more Curiosities. If you bust your budget by 50%,
you're canceled (Webb and Curiosity are in 300-400% overrun
territory). That's all the budget discipline we need. No more
rewarding incompetence or rewarding deliberate lowballing of costs.

Brian

It seems cost overruns and delays are in the DNA of our NASA, DARPA
and JPL. If there's a more spendy and time consuming way of doing it,
that's probably the only way it's ever going to get done.

How about we get Mokaerospace (aka William Mook) for capturing this
one for us, before it eventually does harm than good?

Gravity is the overall big-picture problem for us, because as is more
people seem to die because of encountering or having to deal with
gravity related issues than anything else (Pandora has the right
amount of gravity, as in hardly any). Though locally there's not so
much gravity to fear as there could be actual shards of paramagnetic
basalt from our moon, plus whatever parts from the arriving asteroid
that’ll be attracted by the combined gravity of Earth and our moon.
Unfortunately, Earth will eventually get 2/3 of it (again due to
gravity, just like all them dinosaurs had to pay the ultimate price
due to gravity and that item or several which impacted Earth).

This asteroid (2005 YU55) is arriving too damn fast to get captured as
another moon or LEO item, but it’s certainly capable of demonstrating
a method of capture should it have a glancing lithobraking encounter
with our moon.

Perhaps our crack FEMA and NOAA are simply getting themselves prepared
for a seriously nasty big one (somewhat like our DoD and Pentagon were
off playing war games based upon a large commercial aircraft smacking
into tall buildings on the exact same day as such was actually
happening). Does anyone here believe in Karma?

This one is serious Warhol doom and gloom, and especially doom worthy
if this bad-boy trajectory should drift by any micro-fraction of a
degree and whack into our moon.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/comet...et20110502.gif
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...asteroid-flyby
http://www.universetoday.com/85360/t...h-in-november/
Perhaps this November 9th asteroid (2005 YU55) as a 400 meter
diameter worth of unknown mass (being that it’s so spherical could
suggest a rather solid item of mostly nickel iron), passing through at
38 km/sec with its NEO distance of 324,600 km could conceivably manage
to hit our moon at 13 km/sec. Too bad the regular JPL asteroid NEO
simulator can’t muster up any specifics on how close it’ll get to our
physically dark and naked moon. It looks as though it’ll miss the
moon by roughly a little more than 0.5 LD as depicted in this
following link.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/comet...et20110502.gif
No doubt we’ll see a little fine tuning with their graphic simulation
as it gets closer. A moon impact would not give us much time if some
of the secondary shards are coming our way at 10+ km/sec, and of
course there’s even a slight chance of a glancing blow whereas this
item mostly survives its lithobraking encounter and subsequently
becomes slowed down but otherwise more attracted to the Earth+moon
gravity well.

As far as anyone knows, this one has never gotten so close, so it’ll
be interesting to see how much revising of its NEO simulation takes
place, which should also tell us its mass.

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Brad Guth, Brad_Guth, Brad.Guth, BradGuth, BG / “Guth Usenet”