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Or offense.
You know what they say: the best planetary offense is a good asteroid redirect program It's also the best planetary terrorism, going by the plot of The Expanse
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Be careful about how you store those inflammable propellers.
Inflammable made me so angry as a child/teen when I found out. I read it in our encyclopedia set but we didn't have a dictionary, and this was pre-internet. It was in the context of hydrogen and I could have sworn it was flammable. But here is this encyclopedia telling me it's INflammable. It's... not flammable? Looked it up in the school library. Thank you, that memory came up from the depths of time. Probably haven…
Wild that we went from "can we even deflect an asteroid" to measurably changing a solar orbit. 150 milliseconds sounds tiny until you realize compounding over decades makes that a meaningful trajectory shift. The engineering confidence this gives for actual planetary defense is massive.
Slight changes can cause such impacts? Now imagine how many other meteors and comets also will be adjusting because of this. Will one of them once on a course to never hit earth suddenly shift to hit earth in a thousand years time? The confidence i get is the opposite
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You know what they say: the best planetary offense is a good asteroid redirect program It's also the best planetary terrorism, going by the plot of The Expanse
First things first, we have to colonize the rest of the solar system before we can terrorize Earth.
Interesting. I'd not considered the loss of mass as a means of propulsion. Obviously there was the kinetic energy transfer but the impact ejacted some of the asteroids mass opposite to it's trajectory further increasing it's trajectory change. Cool demonstration, hopefully not needed one day.
Is debris a problem? I think the ideal would be to embed or clamp a rocket on the target.
Wild that we went from "can we even deflect an asteroid" to measurably changing a solar orbit. 150 milliseconds sounds tiny until you realize compounding over decades makes that a meaningful trajectory shift. The engineering confidence this gives for actual planetary defense is massive.
Or offense.
Or in other words, 1 meter per day
Why not say that?
> slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second Or in other words, 1 meter per day Why not say that?