Space rock 'on collision course' with Earth!!!

[monolith94]

"2 km is a serious amount of mass."
It's not mass, silly, it's a length!!!

[ravagon]

Not a clue I'm afraid. Most of the tests have been either underground or airbursts, not a "groundburst" as it would be in the case of hitting an asteroid with a warhead. Assume about 40-50% of the energy goes into the asteroid?
From memory I think the underground tests vapourized over a hundred metre radius of solid "rock" (read: coral reef ) but I don't remember the warhead yields.
I think vapourizing a similar quantity of matter in a body as small as that asteroid should be enough to fracture it ... ?

[KrazyHorse]

Probably not. It would knock a chunk off it, but in my opinion would probably not shatter the whole. At best you could hope to break it in half...

If you could get to it early enough (a year in advance, say), a nice big H-bomb would easily knowck it off course.

[KrazyHorse]

A hundred metre dent runs 5% of the length (and thus occupies 0.0125% of the volume) of the whole...

[monolith94]

wouldn't you have to know height and width to be able to calculate that though?

[Lung]

The point of the above debate is, crucially, how solid is the asteriod in question. If it formed in the Kuiper belt from collated material, you would only need to get individual components moving, for them to slowly, but surely, dissipate. However, if the asteriod was broken off a large body the size of the moon, we would be in deep poo! You do realise that for a simple collection of matter 2km across, you only need to create a shockwave big enough to reach the surface (of noticable force) to dissipate it entirely. Escape velocity of mere centimetres per second only requires a small movement of the entire mass to effectively destroy it.

Considering, though, that few asteroids from the Kuiper belt could ever threaten earth, but asteroids from the asteroid belt can and do, the former is unlikely. The cause of the asteroid belt is the secret to how much of a threat these asteroids are. If they were formed from a rocky planet, they are quite a cause for concern. Then again, if it happened billions of years ago, they are likely to have a reasonably high proportion of collated material.


Mobius, this is all your fault!

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Isn't it interesting...we all have our own opinions, beliefs, dogmas, hatreds, peeves, delights, agendas, each person being unique...and there is a (minute) possiblity that all of us will be wiped out in a second.

[Caesar the Great]

Originally posted by orange
what a way to go.

meh, gotta die sometime

i like your attitude

[Dan Severn]

Originally posted by Frogger
A hundred metre dent runs 5% of the length (and thus occupies 0.0125% of the volume) of the whole...

Then we only need 8000 nukes, and It's bye-bye meteoroid.

[Starchild]

Oh, this will just do wonders for the stock market.

[The Mad Monk]

A 2km wide asteroid isn't really much of a threat in any case. Not enough mass to serious impact the planets axial tilt or orbit (which could annihilate virtually all life) hence the major threat comes from the primary impact and the projected dust cloud fallout.

Assuming eough mass to get through the atmosphere, it's not the mass, it's the velocity (remember which part of the energy equation is cubed). According to the article, the etimated impact velocity (28 km/s) is more than enough to wipe out a continent.

I agree about having time to deal with this, but forget about "blowing it up". What we want to do is push it into a friendlier orbit -- think billiards.

[Lorizael]

Dan do you know how many nukes there are between the US and Russia? Great way to get rid of our stockpile if you ask me...

And the Soviet Union actually constructed 100 megaton warheads for taking out... mountains (Norad).

Personally I hope we are hit. The worlds needs a good shaking up.

Edit: Where did bit come from... nevermind to all who don't know what I'm talking about.

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by The Mad Monk
I agree about having time to deal with this, but forget about "blowing it up". What we want to do is push it into a friendlier orbit -- think billiards.

That's why we need to have a healthy Space programme in place so that if something such as this needs to be addressed, it can be done at a sufficient distance from Earth so that a deflection of a degree or two will be more than enough to miss Earth.

The idea of trying to destroy a meteor close to Earth would merely see us 'rained on' if the nukes succeeded in breaking it up - could that actually have a worse effect?

[Dan Severn]

Originally posted by Lorizael
Dan do you know how many nukes there are between the US and Russia? Great way to get rid of our stockpile if you ask me...

And the Soviet Union actually constructed 100 megaton warheads for taking out... mountains (Norad).

Personally I hope we are hit. The worlds needs a good shaking up.

Edit: Where did bit come from... nevermind to all who don't know what I'm talking about.

The US had 32,000 at one time, but they weren't all "city killers." Many were for tactical use. Personally, I don't like the Idea of nuclear weapons being launched. If we did it from geostat orbit, maybe. But just the US. We all know how safe USSR products were

[Kirnwaffen]

Last I saw, the US and Russia had about 6000 strategic nukes between us.