181–190 of 374 posts
Is there a "sweet spot" for asteroids where they don't impact the earth, but come within like 20 meters of it? Like is it possible for an asteroid to give a city a "buzz cut" and then continue on into outer space?
With the cheap kg to orbit heavy lift systems coming online, these near misses are becoming opportunities for vast riches if they can be captured and mined. Less massive making the orbit easier to change.
Is there a "sweet spot" for asteroids where they don't impact the earth, but come within like 20 meters of it? Like is it possible for an asteroid to give a city a "buzz cut" and then continue on into outer space?
like is doing some heavy lifting here. We have had asteroids pass by at a distance closer than the moon. That's pretty damn close in my book relative to the size of the cosmos. At that scale, that's pretty much a ringer in horse shoes.
The buzzcut is a very strange question though. If the thing enters the atmosphere and does not burn up, it is hitting the ground.
With the cheap kg to orbit heavy lift systems coming online, these near misses are becoming opportunities for vast riches if they can be captured and mined. Less massive making the orbit easier to change.
Why change the orbit? Just lift off way in advance, land on it, mine it, then when the orbit is close just lift off at closest approach
If it is determined years ahead that it will hit, will there be a months to years ahead period where we will know the exact target/landing spot, eg so we can have evacuations of the impacted area and surrounding areas?
with the earth's surface being 70% water, that means a greater chance of a water impact. so there's hope there, except that damn tsunamis again. maybe we can convince the asteroids to hit the spacecraft cemetery
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How far in advance would we know exactly _where_ on the Earth it will hit? If, say, New York is going to be destroyed, it makes a big difference if we know that a year in advance vs. a day.
Does it though? People don't leave hurricane zones. People don't heed tornado warnings. I just have very little faith in humanity, and fell like "Don't Look Up" would be not too far off. Also, if you evacuate New York a year in advance, who's to say that the prediction isn't just a skosh off so that New York is left untouched but the real impact location was hit unprepared?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why change the orbit? Just lift off way in advance, land on it, mine it, then when the orbit is close just lift off at closest approach
The mined material (ie the entire asteroid depending on its composition) would still require delta v to a suitable orbit.
however, if you removed enough mass from the asteroid, would you end up screwing yourself by now changing the orbit so that the next time it swings by it's more of a direct trajectory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great post, thank you! Where does the uncertainty (1%) come from? For example, is it more from our ability to precisely determine the orbit based on limited observations, or is it because orbits for objects like this just aren't predictable years out, or something else?
My guess is that small objects like this suffer greatly from the 3-body problem, and multiple trajectories are generated from various starting points inside our measured error bars for the current states of these objects. Small inaccuracies compound over the years.
What bodies? My impression is that the only objects around Earth with enough gravity to significantly impact trajectories are the Earth and Moon. Will the other small objects have any significant gravitational impact on this body?
I also understand that in cislunar space, the Earth-Moon dynamic does create a three-body problem and trajectories are fundamentally unpredictable, with some exceptions. I wonder how that affects objects such as this one if they pass through the Moon's gravitational well.
This is not an increase over baseline risk (as its Palermo scale[0] indicates, being a negative number, -0.56). I think there's going to be a crisis of media going forwards, because with the very awesome new telescope[1] that's going online this year, the number of these detections is going to drastically go up. The number of objects isn't going up—they've always been there, we just didn't know—but I think the media…
I take that as meaning a crisis of traditional media. But most of our false-positive and false-negative crises are crises of social media. Look at climate change, vaccines, ethnic hatred, pizza gate, every crazy rumor ...
Is there a "sweet spot" for asteroids where they don't impact the earth, but come within like 20 meters of it? Like is it possible for an asteroid to give a city a "buzz cut" and then continue on into outer space?
To have enough energy to come that close without doing so means it has enough energy that superheating the atmosphere or generating nuclear events through impacts with air molecules starts to become a problem (or both: first one then the other). This is the "baseball at the speed of light" type problem from XKCD.