Russia may send spacecraft to knock away asteroid | Hacker News Reader

Russia may send spacecraft to knock away asteroid

news.yahoo.com

21 pointsedw51920 comments

"NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid's path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000."

So this could end up being history's most notable example of premature optimization.

Its nice that they are taking the initiative to experiment despite the low risk of the asteroid actually hitting Earth. However, I sure hope that they are careful and don't accidentally knock it into an orbit that causes a guaranteed Earth hit.

That would be quite a feat.

It would be quite a weapon too!

Against yourself?

It's only 350 metres wide. That'd be enough to seriously fuck up any large country on Earth without causing much damage, relatively, to other parts of the world. Anyway, you could keep the equipment on the rock, keep Apophis skimming Earth nice and close every few years, and have a permanent very big deterrent.

The deterrent wouldn't work. It would take ages to direct it to any target, but a much smaller time to neutralize it with a bomb.

Apophis is big enough to wipe out a large metropolitan area, but not much more than that, with plenty time to evacuate.

It could, however, excavate quite a crater that could become a very large water reservoir.

But I would prefer to do such major construction projects with nukes - the delivery time and positioning are much more controllable. Also, we have a whole lot of them sitting around and the freedom to use larger formats (they wouldn't have to ride on planes or missiles) could yield much cleaner ones too.

I suppose governments won't like the idea of civilians operating gigaton+ nukes, but that's something to be resolved between politicians and lobbyists.

I wonder how large an impact would be required to alter the earth's rate of rotation. I think we could all use a slightly longer day ;)

You could do that with a lot of smaller impacts. Also, it would be advisable to hit all major plates equally, to reduce the risk of major quakes on fault lines. If we were going to try to do it in one impact, we'd better evacuate the planet before too.

And have no plans to return in less than a couple hundred years.

In Soviet Russia asteroid saves world from you.

I wonder if that strategy was considered during the cold war? I wouldn't be surprised.

Given the type of rhetoric coming from Perminov, I suspect that the driving force behind this announcement is merely resurgent Russian nationalism, if not an explicit political directive to distract Russians from the economy, the continuing failures of the military's new submarine-launched balistic missile program, and the destruction of civil society.

I think another angle to this is if actually successful it will be a public demo of space warfare capabilities. Sort of like the Chinese anti-satellite missle test.

Everyone I know is just laughing at it. This is just a way for them to get (or, as they say in Russia, "saw off") more money from the government's coffers.

Apophis has been studied quite closely by astronomers, and the chance of impact has been reduced from tiny to minuscule.

An old story too. Why Perminov decided to choose this time to go open with this idea I do not know.

Now, there may be good reasons to launch a probe towards Apophis, for scientific or technological research. If eventually something like this happens, more power to them.

After we learn to steer asteroids, it would be interesting to make one dip into Earth's atmosphere to de-accelerate and to enter LEO. A mountain of raw materials in low orbit would be a very interesting resource.

You would, of course, have to pick one that is solid enough to withstand this torture or melt its surface to make it a solid blob of something before it fragments and hits something you would rather not hit.

I really like this idea.

This would be a great opportunity to land a probe with some serious drilling equipment. I bet there's a lot of interesting material in that asteroid. I'm not sure changing the trajectory is a great idea though. Seems kind of risky. What if it breaks into smaller pieces? At least do it after it has passed the Earth this time around.

There would be nickel, iron and rock. I think our time would be better served building bomb shelters. I trust NASA's prediction far more than Russia's attempts at "diverting" it.

If the Expected Value in human lives is 6 billion divided by 330,000 (18,800), it might be a worthy project.

It's not expected to be an extinction-level impact even if it were to hit.

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