China plans to deflect an asteroid by 2030 to showcase Earth protection skills

[Admin]

China aims to launch its first planetary defense mission by 2030, to showcase the skills needed to nudge a dangerous asteroid away from Earth.

China plans to deflect an asteroid by 2030 to showcase Earth protection skills : Read more

 

[sharah]

Money woudl be better invested in cleaning our planet. And maybe stopping WAR and creating more PEACE for all.

 

[Hardcrunchyscience]

China aims to launch its first planetary defense mission by 2030, to showcase the skills needed to nudge a dangerous asteroid away from Earth.

China plans to deflect an asteroid by 2030 to showcase Earth protection skills : Read more

Or maybe China is showcasing the skills to potentially nudge a dangerous asteroid onto North America (as in the image at the top of the linked page) or Europe. A question of timing to make it hit a designated and desired continent?

 

[COLGeek]

Or maybe China is showcasing the skills to potentially nudge a dangerous asteroid onto North America (as in the image at the top of the linked page) or Europe. A question of timing to make it hit a designated and desired continent?

...or not.

 

[Hardcrunchyscience]

...or not.

Or maybe. Maybe they want the effect of a small nuke without their fingerprints on it.

 

[COLGeek]

Or maybe. Maybe they want the effect of a small nuke without their fingerprints on it.

The same could be said for any country with the technology to achieve this sort of thing.

This kind of speculation serves no purpose beyond feeding trolls (and that never ends well).

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

Or maybe China is showcasing the skills to potentially nudge a dangerous asteroid onto North America (as in the image at the top of the linked page) or Europe. A question of timing to make it hit a designated and desired continent?

Ugh. This user was banned since; but the comment is so spectacularly stupid that I have to address it even half a year later.

1. Such a small spacecraft can only effect a minute change in the asteroid's orbit, not enough to make it hit the Earth.
2. Even if you could deflect an asteroid enough to hit the Earth, targeting would be very imprecise: the change in the asteroid's trajectory would depend on the precise impact point, the asteroid's internal inhomogeneity, and the moment loss from ejecta, none of which can be predicted with great precision. Even hitting the Earth would be difficult, hitting a specific region even more so.
3. Contrary to the banned user's weird assumption in his second comment, everyone would know about the deflection and about who did it, and know that months in advance. Enough time to launch another emergency deflection mission, and a nuclear counter-strike on the attacking country.
4. A 30 m asteroid is not that serious a threat. It would most likely blow up in the atmosphere and cause an airburst, affecting an area the size of a small city. Would it reach the surface whole, it would create a 300 m crater, with the ejecta again affecting an area the size of a small city; or it would create a moderate tsunami. Since targeting is difficult as told above, the affected area would most likely be uninhabited.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

Money woudl be better invested in cleaning our planet. And maybe stopping WAR and creating more PEACE for all.

I'm all for cleaning the planet and stopping wars, but those aren't in an either-or relationship with protection against natural hazards. In fact, spending on all three are investments that bring gains in lives & money by avoiding losses from destruction.

 

[Classical Motion]

We have all seen the subterranean density patterns, those large ring type structures from the Yucatan Impact. Yes it was a long time ago. That’s no excuse, we know for sure it happened. Much more than once. Look at the moon. Our system is moving, who knows what we may encounter? Or what may encounter us.

Could we stop that type of song with a year’s notice? Even two years.

Maybe we will be lucky and get hit with a small one, to finally prepare for this. A graveyard policy.

One rock can change all reality. And we are aware of it.

Maybe advanced life runs out of probability. Odds.

While planning for Mars.

 

[m4n8tpr8b]

We have all seen the subterranean density patterns, those large ring type structures from the Yucatan Impact. Yes it was a long time ago. That’s no excuse, we know for sure it happened. Much more than once. Look at the moon. Our system is moving, who knows what we may encounter? Or what may encounter us.

Could we stop that type of song with a year’s notice? Even two years.

Maybe we will be lucky and get hit with a small one, to finally prepare for this. A graveyard policy.

One rock can change all reality. And we are aware of it.

Maybe advanced life runs out of probability. Odds.

While planning for Mars.

Obviously, the energy (or moment) needed to deflect an object is proportional to its mass, and the more time we have, the more energy (moment) we could invest with the technology we have, or the more time we would have to build stuff & develop technologies to increase or deflection capabilities.

At our present technology, a one-year forewarning is barely enough for even an object just 140 metres across. For an object the size of the Yucatán impactor, we just don't have the technology; we'd need a forewarning of decades to even develop that technology. Fortunately, at our present technology in astronomy, we practically know all asteroids of this size that can get anywhere near us, and are well on our way to discover all that are a tenth of that size (enough to wipe out a large city), and can predict the orbits a century in advance with fairly good precision. Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about long-period comets (far from the Sun, they are too dark to discover for thousands or millions of years up until maybe a year before an impact), but all the more recent studies show that impacts by those are much less frequent than those by asteroids.

If we prepare for the largest impacts just in case even if none are predicted to occur, I'd be more worried about any mis-use of that capability. Less asteroid terrorism (as I wrote above, this would be attacks where the perpetrator cannot hide, cannot have the targeting precision needed to hit specific targets, and there would be months for counter-measures), more direct attacks on Earth or space stations or bases on other natural objects with the planetary defence weapons (even with no explosives involved, a large mass launched from Earth orbit could do a lot of damage).

Planning for Mars doesn't help. If you think about it, conditions for life are worse on Mars than Earth even during a post-impact "nuclear winter". A Mars colony would depend on Earth for survival. Terraforming Mars would be a herculean multi-generational project, more likely a matter of centuries rather than decades.