Russia's improved ballistic missiles to be tested as asteroid killers
tass.ru
tass.ru
First, small rocks more easily burn up on their way down. So smashing a big rock to pieces increases the surface area enough that maybe that can make it safer for humans.
Secondly, perhaps the energy hitting the big rock would 'deflect' it ever so slightly. Fire it early enough, and you can make it completely miss the earth.
Thoughts?
As a deflector (launched years or decades from impact), you can nudge the impactor out of its present orbit by gently ablating one side from a distance; You can do this iteratively until the impactor's orbit changes enough to miss Earth.
Decades is sufficient for some of the continuous-thrust alternatives, though, depending on scale.
As a point defence weapon (launched weeks or months from impact), you can send the nuke in as close as possible and detonate in order to break up the body. Yes, this would cause lots of smaller impactors, but over some size ranges it's preferable because ablation is insufficient. If 99% of the smaller impactors miss Earth, we win... in some cases.
Just breaking up a large impactor (at the very last minute, launched minutes or hours before impact) doesn't help so much if everything still hits Earth, because a planet-killer turns into hundreds of city-killers randomly spread out.
On the other hand, a small impactor could be dramatically affected by a nuke, with plausible amounts of vaporization going on. There's quite a lot of risk surface in small impactors, and they would be hard to spot until very close.
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Bong Wie is working through a NIAC grant on the problem:
http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/space-hazards/asteroid-hi...
One interim observation: a nuke which detaches from a small cratering round which hits first, digging a hole for the nuke to fit in, would multiply its effectiveness severalfold.
It's a very different problem in each different size class of impactor (as well as orbital classes). 10m, 100m, 1000m, 10000m are all of concern in unique ways; each order of magnitude increase in diameter raises mass by three orders of magnitude.
Wouldn't smaller objects burn up a greater proportion of their mass in the atmosphere (due to the increase surface area) and kick up less of a dust cloud once they impact? Could hundreds of city-killers leave some areas unscathed and still populated and habitable?
I think it would be a great help if a planet-killer could be downgraded to a civilization-killer or even a species-killer.
Hard to say how many rocks you could break a big asteroid into, but I suspect it would still be a much more optimal outcome.
Plus, we could convince the major superpowers to fire all their nuclear arsenal into space. I am all for that.
The bigger problem is that that kind of missile system can be easily weaponized (China and the US have successfully tested satellite killers and the USSR maybe too), so simply enhancing ICBMs for that without international oversight is problematic.
WRT to arms-control regimes: What's the difference between an asteroid-killing BM and an ICBM? Only the warhead count. START inspectors would count such a launcher toward the cap.
Deflection sounds like a great idea, hit it right and send it off to a safer orbit.
You don't want another K-T extinction event when you could just have three cities wiped out instead.
I doubt that Russia or the US needs to really test nuclear weapons at this point, it is all about the delivery mechanism.
All launch vehicles until Apollo were ICBM's. The moon landing was originally planned to be a diplomatic stunt by JFK who wanted a peaceful mission to open a larger diplomatic dialog.
Space programs have always, and likely will always be a way to project power. And test high end military weapons under the guise of peace and science.
The second thing I'd like to say: I never contradicted any facts you state here. Likely they will be using the data to improve their ICBM's, it would be an enormous waste of resources if they didn't. (and so does every other country that has ICBM's)
I said: nothing indicates that they will use a nuclear weapon, "it is all about the delivery mechanism" -> they will use ICBM's but without the warhead, which does not break any treaties to my knowledge.
Do you have a source for that? I'd think there were a multitude of reasons in reality, a specific defense purpose being but one.
Funny enough, high-altitude nuclear testing proved to be a serious concern for the safety of manned space flight.[0]
Ditto for the Russians and other nuclear powers.
Not to say the models are actually wrong: I certainly wouldn't bet my hometown on it.
>Air-launched weapons like cruise missiles must endure hours of sub-freezing temperatures at high altitudes while riding their carrier aircraft. Weaponeers successfully subjected the W-80’s components – including the IHE – to temperatures down to -65 Fahrenheit – during development.
>But when actually tested in Shot Baseball during Operation Guardian in January 1981, the W-80 fizzled. The new nuke failed to ignite its fusion secondary and produced only a fraction of its intended yield. The IHE proved to be the culprit. It didn’t burn well at very low temperatures.
http://warisboring.com/articles/america-had-a-problem-with-i...
IIRC, there's still some need to test in order to evaluate the performance and other aging characteristics of old warheads. The US, at least, is trying to accomplish that testing via simulation rather than actual detonations. though.
They aren't capable of destroying the world; their definitely, OTOH, capable of really dealing a severe blow to human civilization and might even manage to wipe out humanity entirely.
If you had access to the entire arsenal of the US or Russia and wanted to destroy the planet, how would you do it?
This would mean that "pre-emptive" strike is suddenly lot sweeter deal for U.S. Alternatively restart midgetman program. Yay, more nukes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-134_Midgetman
This would be "destabilizing" technology. I hope it goes nowhere.
It's obviously not as applicable to a ballistic launch, but here's an example of publicly known missile guidance that doesn't care about satellites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
I expect even without improvements like that they are prepared to launch and hope that the inertial navigation system in the missile is good enough.
TERCOM is very nice, but only applicable for cruise missiles flying close to ground and able to change their course.
The more important point is the question of whether GPS is actually required for a launch or if it merely improves the process (accuracy, speed, etc).
While GPS might be used to refine locations, both subs and their missiles use inertial navigation that isn't dependent on satellite clusters. A long term lack of GPS would hurt accuracy, but a Russian attack on the GPS system would be such a provocative act that its direct long-term effects on targeting and navigation would probably be insignificant compared to the indirect long-term effects by way of the broader conflict it provokes.
But anyhow just the capability to kill satellites would mean increased tension between the nuclear superpowers.
The US demonstrated that capability in 1963, the USSR in 1978.
Mandatory Simpsons gif: https://media.giphy.com/media/axMy0g9z9khZC/giphy.gif
Since by definition the US missile sub fleet would be used for a second strike role in this situation (by definition, since someone else nuked the satellites first), the strikes would primarily be retaliatory in nature - ie, nuke the cities. Big whoop if your CEP is now 500m when you're nuking Moscow.
Though Russian missile subs worked without such positioning, so they would probably still mean business.
Same applies for phones/tablets/watches, next time you want to write an article about a Samsung device.
Russian scientist (rs): I guess. I mean against international law anyway so we couldn't use them even if we wanted to.
rmc: Can we come up with an excuse.
rs: I guess we could say they're good against asteroids.
rmc: Great, do it!