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The Engineer's Notebook

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NASA Building Asteroid Detection Notification System

Posted April 27, 2019 12:00 AM by M-ReeD
Pathfinder Tags: Asteroid NASA

Everything I know about asteroids, regrettably, comes from the 1998 action film Armageddon.

For those of you who don’t have cable and are not endlessly subjected to showings of the film or who possess the will power to change the channel, a recap: A ragtag group of drilling misfits led by Bruce Willis is sent into space to drill a hole and drop a nuclear bomb into an approaching asteroid that threatens to collide with Earth, subsequently detonating it before impact.

Sounds plausible, no?

Well, recent news from NASA suggests that this riveting storyline could become completely implausible if it makes good on its promise of delivering an infrared space telescope called Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), which can locate asteroids that demonstrate the potential for colliding with Earth.

“I don’t lose sleep over the risk of an undiscovered asteroid impacting the Earth because the chances are small, but they are not zero,” said MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel, who is not part of the NEOCam team. “We have the capability, the adult responsibility, to simply know what’s out there. And NEOCam is basically ready to go.”

The camera has been in the works since 2005 when Congress passed a law requiring NASA to locate 90% of near-Earth objects greater than 460 ft in diameter. The deadline for completing the camera is fast approaching (2020) and its developers hope it will be completed in time to hop aboard the IMAP space probe, which is expected to launch in 2024. Considering that NEOCam offers asteroid size estimates based on infrared observations, the system could potentially offer early notification of an asteroid on course to destroy the Earth, thereby saving humanity.

Just like Bruce Willis did.

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Guru

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#1

Re: NASA Building Asteroid Detection Notification System

04/28/2019 3:55 PM
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Guru

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#3
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Re: NASA Building Asteroid Detection Notification System

04/29/2019 3:38 PM

Unfortunately, it appears we know next to nothing about the variety among asteroids.

Some are rocky debris from collision residue, some may be dried out comet cores with a collision origin rocky debris coating. Crunchy on the outside, icy in the inside. Some may have accreted cometary collision ice debris, or collected vapor from cometary ejecta.

Based on the photos so far, asteroids look like the universe's fuzzy little dust bunnies or at least the local garbage collector. Opening one up could be as exciting as the time my wife tried to vacuum up a spilled tin of percussion caps (no one hurt, but exciting).

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Guru

Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: About 4000 miles from the center of the earth (+/-100 mi)
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#4
In reply to #3

Re: NASA Building Asteroid Detection Notification System

04/30/2019 8:50 PM

We discussed this not too long ago...

https://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/127489/Spinning-an-Asteroid-to-Death

There is evidence that a great many of them are "gravel piles", a conglomeration of small rocks held together by their weak gravity. If a "gravel pile" is spinning, it turns out that gravity and centrifugal are both proportional to the distance from the spin axis. The result is that at a critical rotation rate (which depends on density) the "gravel pile" disintegrates. A scatter plot of spin rate versus asteroid size indicates there is a dearth of asteroids above a critical spin rate (once every 2.2 hours), indicating that most are "gravel piles".

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1810/1810.01815.pdf

If the asteroid is a pile of gravel, moving it off course as a whole might be problematic, but perhaps a large bomb buried within it would disperse the rocks so that hopefully all would miss the earth.

https://www.astrobio.net/meteoritescomets-and-asteroids/how-to-destroy-an-asteroid/

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Guru

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Re: NASA Building Asteroid Detection Notification System

04/29/2019 3:22 PM
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