Space rock 'on collision course'
 

Weapons of mass destruction don't sound that bad now, huh? Are we gonna throw rockets and stuff to destoy it?
Let's hope for good news in the future, I don't want to die so young :( .

http://www.blogiseverything.com/imag..._the_world.gif
More info here: BBC NEWS

http://a.abc.com/images/20050919/mov...geddon_big.jpg

Go.

Also, do you have any idea not only A) how often rocks fly right on past us B) how miniscule the odds are that a collision will even occur are?

Miniscule, but not impossible.

Of course, it's also conceivable that we can calibrate our missile weaponry to intercept such an object. We've put entire ships into space and sent complex satellites on finely calculated journeys past Saturn. I hold no fears that, by 2019, we'll be unable to throw a few glorified bombs into the meteor's path. One atomic bomb levelled Nagasaki. I think two or three could handle a rock with a span of only a couple kilometers. It doesn't even require much fuel. Just enough for a missile to escape Earth's orbit. From there, the flight path would be calculated and the missile could probably coast toward its target.

If it weren't for oversensationalized films like Armageddon and Deep Impact, the general population would react far more rationally to this kind of news.

But instead of blowing up the rock and risking a rain of stone over the whole earth, wouldn't it be better to like, "shove" it out of our way and let it fly by? Maybe a single atomic bomb or something could give it a push.

Wouldnt it be cool if nuke mutates lifeforms on the rock and suddenly we have a alien war on our hans =D

Eh, I don't know. The largest bomb the US ever detonated, "Castle Bravo", (15 MT) only left a crater one mile wide and just slightly less than 300 feet deep. In coral. (The fireball itself was more than three miles wide.) Good luck vaporizing something made out of solid rock (or even worse, iron) and moving at thousands of miles per hour. That's a lot of kinetic energy! Even a huge bomb (such as a Tsar Bomba size bomb, roughly 50MT) probably wouldn't have much of an effect. High altitude test detonations (such as shots "Teak" and "Orange") dissipated almost immediately, and those weren't even fully in outer space. In the vacuum of space, there is no air to form a fireball, or a shock wave. The energy of the bomb would radiate out into space unimpeded. (Supposedly; there has never been a deep-space bomb detonation, so nobody knows what would truly happen.)

Even so, there is no upper limit on how large and powerful you can make a thermonuclear weapon, so who knows. Maybe a truly huge bomb could do it. Maybe. There are also deflection strategies, but you'd have to intercept it very far out to make those kinds of trajectory changes. I guess I'm just a skeptic.

Also:

Ok, so there is no thread. Useless thread, can be closed now >_>.

Cool, free mod action stats. :judge:

Ehh, I assume you meant ''threat'', but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to discuss. Crash Landon still has to answer Namek, at least. I will re-open this.

Double Post:
(hehe, mod stats ;))

I'm not so sure about hurling nukes at the thing, but according to a popular science mag in Denmark, NASA is working out several ways to get those things out of the way. One of them is a tungsten projectile which, given enough speed, should push the trajectory enough.

I think that film was called 'Evolution'...

Don't worry about 2019, it was proven a while ago that the panic was caused thanks to a calculation error. The real impact would be around 800 years later. I'm sure it will be no big deal for mankind by then.

There is a difference between obliterating a city and destroying an asteroid. A city only requires the destruction of what is on the surface.

That rock better stay away from this planet if it knows what's good for it, or at least tone down its estimated damage. Otherwise someone'll probably sic the Evil Genius Union on its ass for putting us out of job.

Not good for its life expectancy.

You know, I have to count myself as gullable for getting worked up about this same story each time it is posted (with a year seperating them.) I should just bother to look at the date in the source article more closely.

That isn't to say that other near Earth objects could already be headed for a simmilar course, but then again any number of things could happen between then and now. The main thing is that the threat is very real, and the possiblity that we would be caught with out pants down (discovering a rock that is weeks away from impact) is also ever present. So, the US (and other countries) should really make meteor defense and funding to identify these objects more of a priority.

Well some of them are impossible to spot in time before it's too late. Comets come to mind here. You really cant see them too well untill they start aproaching the sun. So they're pretty much invisible untill they get closer. Then when we see them there's not enough time left to do anything about it. I dont think any amount of funding could change this because you just cant see them. Then take into account that we can only monitor a small part of the sky.. and it becomes an incredibly hard task to spot them all.

We're actually pretty lucky.. Alot of misses plus we have a big gigantic ball of gas that shields us from most of them. :P

With all the bomb testing countries have done on earth you'd think at least one test could be done in outer space. Or on the moon.

That would be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty.

I'm suprised by that time (or now really) that there would be some sort of counteractting solution to one of these things, but I guess out $$$ is going somewhere else.

But we don't know that we're a part of that!

See, to say we aren't would require us to go all the way to Alpha Centauri.

I am with Crash, I think we'll be able to blow something like that up in a couple of decades also. However, it is less than trivial to shoot a missle at something in space that is only a mile wide and travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. I wonder if they even consider talking about that yet at places like the JPL.

Shooting a nuke at it is a bad idea. After the explosion, the fragments will likely come together again, and the earth will receive a shower of radioactive clusterbombing.

Well, I guess this means it's time to get a job on an oil rig.

Not necessarily. If the fragments aren't too big, they'd likely just burn up in the atmosphere. It'd have to be a hell of a bomb though.