|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
100 megaton bombs atop Saturn V rockets
"Elden" wrote in message ink.net... http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/1 Every nineteen years the large asteroid Icarus swings by planet Earth, often coming within four million miles of the planet astronomical terms. Icarus last passed by Earth in 1997. Before that, its previous approach was in June 1968. We now know that such near-Earth asteroids are not all that rare and in recent years Congress and NASA have shown greater interest in trying to track, and even visit them. What the group decided to do was to take six Saturn V rockets then in production, and with only minimal modifications to their payloads use them to carry smaller bombs to Icarus. The first launch would have to take place by April 1968, only a year away, and five more launches would have to follow at two-week increments. What is it with this f*cking infatuation with nuclear bombs!!! Why do they keep wanting to blow up things when it has been shown many times before that this is the wrong kind of solution. In fact, it could make things even worse! |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
["Followup-To:" header set to sci.space.policy.]
On 2004-07-07, BitBanger wrote: "Elden" wrote in message ink.net... http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/1 (...) What is it with this f*cking infatuation with nuclear bombs!!! Why do they keep wanting to blow up things when it has been shown many times before that this is the wrong kind of solution. In fact, it could make things even worse! Um. As I understand it, the 1968 study was one of the first attempts to figure out what to do with an impactor, specifically an impactor at relatively short notice and without exotic technology; it's a bit silly to talk about it having "been shown many times before" regarding an article talking about something that happened thirty-six years ago... when it hadn't. I believe that, even at MIT, crystal balls are scarce. Note the use of phrases like "Very little was known about how nuclear weapons would actually behave in space, let alone how the blast would affect an asteroid" Also note that the author noted in their second paragraph: "And the plan probably would not have worked." That aside, *has* it been shown it's the "wrong kind of solution"? Other methods have certainly been suggested, but I'm not aware of where the consensus lies on deflection methods (though there are clear downsides to the nuclear-bomb method). -- -Andrew Gray |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
In article ,
Andrew Gray wrote: That aside, *has* it been shown it's the "wrong kind of solution"? Other methods have certainly been suggested, but I'm not aware of where the consensus lies on deflection methods (though there are clear downsides to the nuclear-bomb method). If you have to do something on short notice, deflection is about the only option, and nuclear bombs are about the only way to quickly put really large amounts of energy into deflection. Avoid letting anti-military paranoia blind you to these facts. There are likely to be better ways to deal with asteroids and short-period comets, because given enough advance warning, their orbits can be altered in less violent ways. However, we may not have the option for long-period comets, because we simply don't see them more than a year or so out. And of course, we don't *yet* have the near-Earth asteroids and short-period comets mapped well enough to be sure we'd have plenty of warning for them. (There are particularly bad long-period-comet cases where we would get *very* little warning, because the comet's position in the sky is very close to the Sun for most of its approach. That can at least be mitigated by maintaining a comet-watching station well away from Earth, say in one of the Sun-Earth Trojan points. But we're effectively always seeing long-period comets for the first time, so this just means the warning is measured in months rather than weeks.) The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear bomb in vacuum) into propulsion, and how well the object will hold up to a fairly sudden shove. Even quite a loose object may be okay for *one* shove if you can deliver the force to more or less an entire hemisphere, e.g. with an explosion at some distance blowing off a surface layer. A more localized shove, or multiple shoves, may be practical only for objects with significant structural strength. We know almost nothing about the internal structure of either asteroids or comets, and the guesses are all over the map. We speculate that some of them, perhaps many of them, are fluffy "rubble piles" with very little strength. Certainly there are hints that way. But the asteroid Eros is *not* a rubble pile; it is something approximating solid rock (possibly with cracks) with a bit of regolith on the surface. Similarly, the nuclei of comets Halley and Borrelly may be rubble piles, but the nucleus of comet Wild 2 is *not*. Asteroids and comets are very diverse bodies -- just how diverse, we are only beginning to see -- and we'd need to know rather more about them to make good predictions about how best to do last-minute deflection. If we do have to do a short-notice deflection before we have better information, about all we can do is take our best guess, launch bombs -- smaller ones than the MIT study specified, because we no longer have a Saturn-V-class launcher handy -- and pray that it works. -- "Think outside the box -- the box isn't our friend." | Henry Spencer -- George Herbert | |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
"Elden" wrote in message
link.net... http://www.thespacereview.com/article/175/1 Every 19 years the large asteroid Icarus swings by planet Earth, often coming within four million miles of the planet in astronomical terms. Icarus last passed by Earth in 1997. Before that, its previous approach was in June 1968. We now know that such near-Earth asteroids are not all that rare and in recent years Congress and NASA have shown greater interest in trying to track, and even visit them. What the group decided to do was to take six Saturn V rockets then in production, and with only minimal modifications to their payloads use them to carry smaller bombs to Icarus. The first launch would have to take place by April 1968, only a year away, and five more launches would have to follow at two-week increments. What is it with this f*cking infatuation with nuclear bombs!!! Why do they keep wanting to blow up things when it has been shown many times before that this is the wrong kind of solution. In fact, it could make things even worse! Actually, one big bomb is bad... but many little bombs would be much more effective. George Dyson's book on Orion and the detail on 'thrust unit' (sic?) design would be very relevant to this discussion. -- John Bartley K7AAY http://celdata.cjb.net This post quad-ROT-13 encrypted; reading it violates the DMCA. Nobody but a fool goes into a federal counterrorism operation without duct tape - Richard Preston, THE COBRA EVENT. |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
BitBanger wrote: What is it with this f*cking infatuation with nuclear bombs!!! They are basically a American Totem Object; their is absolutely no problem that can't be solved via a nuclear weapon or two. Hurricane approaching? An H-bomb or so will take care of that. Asteroid threatening? We're ready. Need to excavate a reservoir inside of five minutes? Just push the red button. Things not going well in Vietnam? Well, if you had just taken MacArthur's advice back in Korea.... Martian War Machines threatening Los Angles? Okay....they may not work on everything. Radiation is sort of like magic...you can't see the stuff, but it can help you....or croak you pronto. At least no one ever did that idea I read about of putting nuclear isotopes into the concrete of highways so that the heat of nuclear decay would keep them warm and ice-free in winter. And the Atomic Powered Tank was also stillborn; which is a pity, as it probably wouldn't have even needed armor, due to the fact that no one in their right mind would dare shoot anything at it, for fear of what might happen if they actually hit it. :-) Why do they keep wanting to blow up things when it has been shown many times before that this is the wrong kind of solution. In fact, it could make things even worse! Especially given the fact that at the time we knew hardly anything about what asteroids were made from or how solidly they were put together; so that trying this stunt might have resulted with a whole pile of subasteroids being generated from the fracturing of Icarus' into large pieces by the blasts, and the odds of one of those fragments hitting Earth actually increase the danger to us over time as their trajectories spread apart. We discussed the effectiveness of nuclear weapons against asteroids her on sci.space.history a while back; they are a lot less impressive in space than they are in an atmosphere; you basically end up generating thrust against the asteroid by vaporizing its outer surface with their radiation flux. About the only way you could really damage a asteroid is get the bomb down near the core of the asteroid, and let the blast generate explosive gas pressure from the vaporized rock...and that would pretty much guarantee that you end up with a cloud of larger and smaller fragments. About as smart as hitting a beehive with a baseball bat. ;-) Pat |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
On Wed, 07 Jul 2004 21:35:43 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote: They are basically a American Totem Object; their is absolutely no problem that can't be solved via a nuclear weapon or two. Hurricane approaching? An H-bomb or so will take care of that. Asteroid threatening? We're ready. Need to excavate a reservoir inside of five minutes? Just push the red button. Things not going well in Vietnam? Well, if you had just taken MacArthur's advice back in Korea.... Martian War Machines threatening Los Angles? Okay....they may not work on everything. Radiation is sort of like magic...you can't see the stuff, but it can help you....or croak you pronto. Now that you mention it, this newsgroup could use a neutron bomb or two. ;-) - Rusty Barton |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
Henry Spencer wrote: In article , Andrew Gray wrote: That aside, *has* it been shown it's the "wrong kind of solution"? Other methods have certainly been suggested, but I'm not aware of where the consensus lies on deflection methods (though there are clear downsides to the nuclear-bomb method). If you have to do something on short notice, deflection is about the only option, and nuclear bombs are about the only way to quickly put really large amounts of energy into deflection. Avoid letting anti-military paranoia blind you to these facts. There are likely to be better ways to deal with asteroids and short-period comets, because given enough advance warning, their orbits can be altered in less violent ways. However, we may not have the option for long-period comets, because we simply don't see them more than a year or so out. And of course, we don't *yet* have the near-Earth asteroids and short-period comets mapped well enough to be sure we'd have plenty of warning for them. (There are particularly bad long-period-comet cases where we would get *very* little warning, because the comet's position in the sky is very close to the Sun for most of its approach. That can at least be mitigated by maintaining a comet-watching station well away from Earth, say in one of the Sun-Earth Trojan points. But we're effectively always seeing long-period comets for the first time, so this just means the warning is measured in months rather than weeks.) A lot of our search efforts are concentrated in the ecliptic plane (because that's where most of the comets and asteroids are). But long period comets are bad because their inclination is about as likely to be 90 as 0 degrees. To cover all our bets we'd need 4 pi steradian surveillance (in two places, as you say, so the sun wouldn't block our view). The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear bomb in vacuum) into propulsion, and how well the object will hold up to a fairly sudden shove. Even quite a loose object may be okay for *one* shove if you can deliver the force to more or less an entire hemisphere, e.g. with an explosion at some distance blowing off a surface layer. A more localized shove, or multiple shoves, may be practical only for objects with significant structural strength. We know almost nothing about the internal structure of either asteroids or comets, and the guesses are all over the map. We speculate that some of them, perhaps many of them, are fluffy "rubble piles" with very little strength. Certainly there are hints that way. But the asteroid Eros is *not* a rubble pile; it is something approximating solid rock (possibly with cracks) with a bit of regolith on the surface. Similarly, the nuclei of comets Halley and Borrelly may be rubble piles, but the nucleus of comet Wild 2 is *not*. Asteroids and comets are very diverse bodies -- just how diverse, we are only beginning to see -- and we'd need to know rather more about them to make good predictions about how best to do last-minute deflection. Yes, some of Wild's cliff walls are quite steep. If it were rubble, the slopes would be gentler. Another example is asteroid 1998 KY26 http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020919.html which is spinning quite fast. If it were a rubble pile, it'd fly apart. Then Shoemaker Levy 9's string of pearls seems to show it was a rubble pile. I'd guessing we'll find quite a variety of different creatures when we learn more about the comets and asteroids. If we do have to do a short-notice deflection before we have better information, about all we can do is take our best guess, launch bombs -- smaller ones than the MIT study specified, because we no longer have a Saturn-V-class launcher handy -- and pray that it works. -- Hop David http://clowder.net/hop/index.html |
#9
|
|||
|
|||
Pat Flannery wrote: Especially given the fact that at the time we knew hardly anything about what asteroids were made from or how solidly they were put together; so that trying this stunt might have resulted with a whole pile of subasteroids being generated from the fracturing of Icarus' into large pieces by the blasts, and the odds of one of those fragments hitting Earth actually increase the danger to us over time as their trajectories spread apart. I like this MADMEN proposal: http://www.space.com/businesstechnol...ed_040519.html I've been told it may be possible for the MADMEN's mass drivers to shoot asteroidal reaction mass in specific directions at very high velocities. Besides diverting dangerous asteroids, MADMEN may be able to tweak orbits of resource rich asteroids to make their orbits resonant to earth (so you wouldn't have to wait decades between launch windows) We discussed the effectiveness of nuclear weapons against asteroids her on sci.space.history a while back; they are a lot less impressive in space than they are in an atmosphere; you basically end up generating thrust against the asteroid by vaporizing its outer surface with their radiation flux. About the only way you could really damage a asteroid is get the bomb down near the core of the asteroid, and let the blast generate explosive gas pressure from the vaporized rock...and that would pretty much guarantee that you end up with a cloud of larger and smaller fragments. About as smart as hitting a beehive with a baseball bat. ;-) Seems like there's a news story every two years or so of someone doing exactly that. Or spraying a hornet's nest with bug spray. Pat -- Hop David http://clowder.net/hop/index.html |
#10
|
|||
|
|||
Henry Spencer wrote:
The big question marks for deflection with nuclear bombs are how best to turn a massive soft-X-ray flash (which is what you get out of a nuclear bomb in vacuum) into propulsion, It is not at all obvious that heating up the comet's surface with X-Rays is the way to do it. Think Casaba Howitzer. -- Scott Lowther, Engineer Remove the obvious (capitalized) anti-spam gibberish from the reply-to e-mail address |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
100 megaton bombs atop Saturn V rockets | BitBanger | Policy | 164 | September 1st 04 07:07 AM |
Astronomical Observations - Parts 1 & 2 | Fact Finder | Amateur Astronomy | 5 | August 25th 03 03:52 PM |
Incontrovertible Evidence | Cash | Astronomy Misc | 1 | August 24th 03 07:22 PM |
Incontrovertible Evidence | Cash | Amateur Astronomy | 6 | August 24th 03 07:22 PM |
NASA artist illustrations and cutaways of Saturn vehicles | Rusty Barton | History | 3 | August 24th 03 10:39 AM |