• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Meteorite hits central Russia, 400+ injured

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
In order to efficiently build a space craft with enough mass to alter the trajectory of a large asteroid we would need a base on the moon capable of mining and production.

Should have voted Gingrich, damn.
 
klinc said:
wow so that ice so cool it didn't melt going through the earths atmosphere?
Click to expand...

Frozen material, encased with rock. See it starts heating up. Expanding inside the cavern housing it until the pressure is too great and...boom. Remember these objects are travelling about 10 miles a second. How long do you think they are lit up in the atmosphere?
 
MomentsofSanity said:
Frozen material, encased with rock. See it starts heating up. Expanding inside the cavern housing it until the pressure is too great and...boom. Remember these objects are travelling about 10 miles a second. How long do you think they are lit up in the atmosphere?
Click to expand...

Surface of the meteoroid melts from the heat of the compressed gas in front of it. The ice only gets formed after everything because it happens so hight up that is why you will see ice on it. When it hits below the speed of sound the shockwave stops and it drops slowly to the ground. The core is cold cause the hottest parts got ripped of due to heat melting it. So that shock wave wasn't a explosion its just the stand off shock.
 
DucatiMonster696 said:
True but the most difficult part is actually detecting such an object early enough to be able to launch something which would be able to travel out in time to a far enough distance so that it could actually affect the course of the incoming object.
Click to expand...

NASA already has a program to detect over 90% of the Asteroids over 1km that are close to Earth and they believe they have meet this goal. The programs should be expanded with the possibility of looking into more space based missions to help speed up detection. Right now their is a proposal called Near Earth Object Camera which would place a infrared Telescope at the Earth-Sun L1 point and should detect over 2/3 of all objects over 140 meters in size.

I see asteroid/meteor avoidance falling into two categories.

The smaller asteroids I would say less than 200m , the city killers that pack enough energy to destroy a good city. These are the ones that we might have minimal early warning. We would use nuclear weapon against those launched by a rocket. A 4-6 Megaton Nuclear device should vaporize most of a meteor this size. We would have a pre-packaged system with rockets on stand-by. Because we might have minimal warning time. Something like the Delta IV Heavy which can put over 5 metric tons into escape velocity. The Delta IV Heavy also has a excellent track record during launches. The vehicle would have a observer vehicle that would detach before impact and then the imp actor with warhead. The observer vehicle would allow a good view of the impact/detonation of the warhead.

For larger Asteroids hopefully we would have years of warning if not decades. Something like 99942 Apophis. We would look at using other technologies like a gravity tractor to adjust it's course. We could maybe look at adjusting the course to maybe put it into orbit say around the moon so we could possibly mine the asteroid.

However all these technologies assume a more robust space program which we seem to lack the national will to properly fund.
 
Brovane said:
NASA already has a program to detect over 90% of the Asteroids over 1km that are close to Earth and they believe they have meet this goal. The programs should be expanded with the possibility of looking into more space based missions to help speed up detection. Right now their is a proposal called Near Earth Object Camera which would place a infrared Telescope at the Earth-Sun L1 point and should detect over 2/3 of all objects over 140 meters in size.

I see asteroid/meteor avoidance falling into two categories.

The smaller asteroids I would say less than 200m , the city killers that pack enough energy to destroy a good city. These are the ones that we might have minimal early warning. We would use nuclear weapon against those launched by a rocket. A 4-6 Megaton Nuclear device should vaporize most of a meteor this size. We would have a pre-packaged system with rockets on stand-by. Because we might have minimal warning time. Something like the Delta IV Heavy which can put over 5 metric tons into escape velocity. The Delta IV Heavy also has a excellent track record during launches. The vehicle would have a observer vehicle that would detach before impact and then the imp actor with warhead. The observer vehicle would allow a good view of the impact/detonation of the warhead.

For larger Asteroids hopefully we would have years of warning if not decades. Something like 99942 Apophis. We would look at using other technologies like a gravity tractor to adjust it's course. We could maybe look at adjusting the course to maybe put it into orbit say around the moon so we could possibly mine the asteroid.

However all these technologies assume a more robust space program which we seem to lack the national will to properly fund.
Click to expand...

I would hope something like this would get funding from all nations with space launch capabilities. I agree though, so hopefully this will raise some awareness.
 
Asteroid 2012 DA14 Passed 17000 miles from the earth and they call it a close shave. I mean 17000 miles is a big distance IMO
 
AFAIK, The "explode" that meteors do isn't the same "explode" that people normally think of. It's conservation of energy, and they have a shit ton of kinetic energy. As they streak through the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, the air in front of them gets compressed. This causes the surface to heat up (and some of it ablates off), but for the inside to heat up, it still follows principles of thermal conductivity. Throw an ice cube into boiling water, and you get the idea - remember, any ice that you can still see is still at 32 degrees F or below. But, due to all the different stresses, it can still break apart. When it breaks apart, the smaller pieces have more surface area per unit of mass. The result of this is much more rapid conversion of kinetic energy into heat energy. Break it up even further, and you convert even more of the kinetic energy to heat energy. I suppose you could liken it to suddenly releasing a parachute (increase the surface area) - that suddenly transfers a lot of energy to the atmosphere.
 
DrPizza said:
AFAIK, The "explode" that meteors do isn't the same "explode" that people normally think of. It's conservation of energy, and they have a shit ton of kinetic energy. As they streak through the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, the air in front of them gets compressed. This causes the surface to heat up (and some of it ablates off), but for the inside to heat up, it still follows principles of thermal conductivity. Throw an ice cube into boiling water, and you get the idea - remember, any ice that you can still see is still at 32 degrees F or below. But, due to all the different stresses, it can still break apart. When it breaks apart, the smaller pieces have more surface area per unit of mass. The result of this is much more rapid conversion of kinetic energy into heat energy. Break it up even further, and you convert even more of the kinetic energy to heat energy. I suppose you could liken it to suddenly releasing a parachute (increase the surface area) - that suddenly transfers a lot of energy to the atmosphere.
Click to expand...

That is why I said they break up but not explode. Reading the article it sounded like the whole thing suddenly exploded like a bomb. The shock wave is not even part of a explosion but just sonic boom
 
klinc said:
Asteroid 2012 DA14 Passed 17000 miles from the earth and they call it a close shave. I mean 17000 miles is a big distance IMO
Click to expand...

It passed below the altitude of many of our satellites.

To put things in perspective, the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit (if the orbit were a perfect circle, "the radius of the orbit") is 1.496*10^11 meters. The diameter of the Earth is around 12,756 km = 1.2756 x 10^7 meters. Let's shrink the Earth down to the size of a basketball. The diameter of a basketball is about .25m. If Earth was a basketball, then its semi-major axis would be 2932 meters. Earth isn't a perfect sphere, nor is its orbit a perfect circle, but for simplicity's sake, it's close enough to circular (despite the elliptical pictures in your elementary school books). So, picture a basketball moving in a big circle, 3 kilometers in radius. (A circle 3.72 miles across) in one year. It would be traveling around that circle at 50 meters per day. So, put that basketball on the sideline of a football field - it travels half the length of the football field each day, and was missed by about 20 inches.

Sounds close to me.
 
klinc said:
That is why I said they break up but not explode. Reading the article it sounded like the whole thing suddenly exploded like a bomb. The shock wave is not even part of a explosion but just sonic boom
Click to expand...
I was agreeing with you. The word "explode" is commonly used, but it doesn't mean what people think it means in this context.
 
klinc said:
Asteroid 2012 DA14 Passed 17000 miles from the earth and they call it a close shave. I mean 17000 miles is a big distance IMO
Click to expand...

If the earth had been 15 mins earlier in its orbit of the sun it would have hit us so

/shrug
 
DrPizza said:
It passed below the altitude of many of our satellites.

To put things in perspective, the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit (if the orbit were a perfect circle, "the radius of the orbit") is 1.496*10^11 meters. The diameter of the Earth is around 12,756 km = 1.2756 x 10^7 meters. Let's shrink the Earth down to the size of a basketball. The diameter of a basketball is about .25m. If Earth was a basketball, then its semi-major axis would be 2932 meters. Earth isn't a perfect sphere, nor is its orbit a perfect circle, but for simplicity's sake, it's close enough to circular (despite the elliptical pictures in your elementary school books). So, picture a basketball moving in a big circle, 3 kilometers in radius. (A circle 3.72 miles across) in one year. It would be traveling around that circle at 50 meters per day. So, put that basketball on the sideline of a football field - it travels half the length of the football field each day, and was missed by about 20 inches.

Sounds close to me.
Click to expand...

Excellent description. :thumbsup:
 
Make some large reflective sheets, graphene maybe, park them as close to the sun as they'll tolerate, then unfurl and focus light on the asteroid and let light pressure alert the lento over the course of years. Yeah I make that up. 😀
 
DrPizza said:
It passed below the altitude of many of our satellites.

To put things in perspective, the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit (if the orbit were a perfect circle, "the radius of the orbit") is 1.496*10^11 meters. The diameter of the Earth is around 12,756 km = 1.2756 x 10^7 meters. Let's shrink the Earth down to the size of a basketball. The diameter of a basketball is about .25m. If Earth was a basketball, then its semi-major axis would be 2932 meters. Earth isn't a perfect sphere, nor is its orbit a perfect circle, but for simplicity's sake, it's close enough to circular (despite the elliptical pictures in your elementary school books). So, picture a basketball moving in a big circle, 3 kilometers in radius. (A circle 3.72 miles across) in one year. It would be traveling around that circle at 50 meters per day. So, put that basketball on the sideline of a football field - it travels half the length of the football field each day, and was missed by about 20 inches.

Sounds close to me.
Click to expand...

That's why they pay you the big bucks to be a teacher! 😉
 
DrPizza said:
It passed below the altitude of many of our satellites.

To put things in perspective, the semi-major axis of Earth's orbit (if the orbit were a perfect circle, "the radius of the orbit") is 1.496*10^11 meters. The diameter of the Earth is around 12,756 km = 1.2756 x 10^7 meters. Let's shrink the Earth down to the size of a basketball. The diameter of a basketball is about .25m. If Earth was a basketball, then its semi-major axis would be 2932 meters. Earth isn't a perfect sphere, nor is its orbit a perfect circle, but for simplicity's sake, it's close enough to circular (despite the elliptical pictures in your elementary school books). So, picture a basketball moving in a big circle, 3 kilometers in radius. (A circle 3.72 miles across) in one year. It would be traveling around that circle at 50 meters per day. So, put that basketball on the sideline of a football field - it travels half the length of the football field each day, and was missed by about 20 inches.

Sounds close to me.
Click to expand...

Sarah agrees!

62154_271984316265646_823598592_n.png
 
Hayabusa Rider said:
Make some large reflective sheets, graphene maybe, park them as close to the sun as they'll tolerate, then unfurl and focus light on the asteroid and let light pressure alert the lento over the course of years. Yeah I make that up. 😀
Click to expand...

nasa has said using giant light sails with parabolic properties to focus light onto an asteroid could potentially drive it off course.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top