back to article This hero probe will smash into an asteroid to see if we can deflect future killer rocks

On Monday, September 26 at 2314 UTC, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in America, and those monitoring ground-based telescopes across our planet, will be celebrating something usually associated with failure in space missions. The complete destruction of and loss of signal from a spacecraft …

  1. claimed Bronze badge
    Mushroom

    Once it's off course...

    ...THEN we detonate the nuclear warheads to blow it to smithereens and make an example of it, don't want the other dino-bludgeoning wannabes thinking we don't have Bruce Willis hanging around, our Solar System propaganda signals can only get us so far

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Once it's off course...

      "...detonate thenuclear warheads to blow it to smithereens..."

      That's already been suggested, and "simulated". The "Comet Blasters" launched nukes from their space-station-based spacecraft to do this, with backup from the ground-based "Meteor Sweepers".

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratos_4

    2. Tom 7

      Re: Once it's off course...

      Slight problem with that. The one that killed the dinosaurs did so because a lot of it went back up into space and basically grilled most of the earth. The same would happen if you tried to blow up an asteroid - you'd produce a shower of gravel that would burn up in the high atmosphere at temperatures of several thousand degrees. If it was far enough away (and currently we might not spot it until too late) it might just produce the meteorite shower of the millennia - but then a lot of people might think its end of days and top themselves as many did in the US in the 18thC iIRC.

      So baby steps...

  2. Irony Deficient

    scientists at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

    It’s the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; the university was named after its first benefactor, Johns Hopkins.

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Typo

      Yeah, yeah, we know - we were concentrating on making all the technical stuff right in the other 1,499 words in the piece so it could run before the main event on Monday.

      It's fixed - don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong please.

      C.

      1. ChoHag Silver badge

        Re: Typo

        The phrase you're looking for is "Thanks! We missed that one!"

        1. Gene Cash Silver badge

          Re: Typo

          You are talking to a Vulture, after all... be glad he doesn't resurrect the Moderatrix.

          1. Dizzy Dwarf

            Re: Typo

            Calm down everyone.

            We don't want to have to call out the St John's Ambulance.

      2. Irony Deficient

        It’s fixed -

        Thank you for the fix.

        don’t forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot something wrong please.

        I hope that as part of your typo-fixing process, you’ll search past articles to see if the same typo needs to be fixed elsewhere (e.g. using site:www.theregister.com "john hopkins" in your preferred search engine).

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't wanna clooose my eeeeeyes...

    It's about time we had a Plan B...since Bruce Willis is losing his marbles it's probably unwise to send him up.

    1. Danny 2

      Re: I don't wanna clooose my eeeeeyes...

      I lost all my marbles aged five, never any good at that game.. I heroically volunteer to be sent up to the next comet with a hammer and a chisel.

      Maybe of small interest but I didn't realise Oort was a Dutch name. I've been pronouncing it as Ooh ooh Oort it's magic - it's actually pronounced Ort. It's the sort of error that you don't want to make with Professor Brian Cox.

  4. brainwrong

    "make sure DART is on the right path and counting down the hours before it can attack"

    Attack? Are there jewish space lasers on board?

    "And then an hour prior to impact for the first time you'll see just one pixel in the field of view of our camera, or DRACO, and that's going to be Dimorphism. And so at that point, this is when we switch from guiding towards Didymos towards guiding to Dimorphos."

    One hour seems rather last minute to correct course to target when going over 14,000mph. That's barely enough time for me to swerve to avoid pot-holes when driving.

    1. Lars Silver badge
      Happy

      @brainwrong

      I can assure you that one hour is exactly one hour at any speed.

      1. JassMan
        Trollface

        @Lars

        Almost any physics teacher would be very disappointed to read that answer. The length of an hour very much depends on speed. Otherwise Einstein wasted his entire life

        1. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

          Re: @Lars

          Yes, JassMan, time is indeed in deed variable and relative to interest .....

          “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” .... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/

          And aint that the truth. :-)

        2. Lars Silver badge
          Happy

          Re: @Lars

          @JassMan

          Yes Yes but this was about pot-holes and what not and one hour on earth and I did expect this type of comments.

        3. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: @Lars

          An hour is always[*] an hour to the person experiencing it. It may, however, measure differently to an observer.

          *Waste of time meetings at the office with a PHB droning on excepted.

        4. Tom 7

          Re: @Lars

          The length of an hour very much depends on gravity to!

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: @Lars

            I can't see the 2nd "o" in "to!" Did you use a black hole instead of a white hole and it just doesn't appear to arrived yet due to time dilation ir did it just suck in the local light?

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  5. Lordrobot

    Asteroid banks and hits 8Ball Earth into the Corner pocket Ouch

    What could go wrong with this Plan? Well as Mike Tyson says, "Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face."

    Oh but this is safe... Newton might disagree. If you play the KNOCKOUT game with an asteroid, what happens if that little bitty one degree causes a shift in gravitational pull and turns into a banging mechanical pinball game... ringing buzzers and bells and shaking the solar system loose... like the aptly named "FIREBALL" from the 1970s?

    There at FIREBALL is greaser Clarence "Buddy" Repperton with the front two legs of the FIREBALL pinball machine balanced atop the tips of his pointed PFC greaser shoes... The fate of the world in the balance. ding, ding, ding, ding, ding... ding ... TILT!

    Oh well, it's only one solar system destroyed...

    1. Danny 2

      Re: Asteroid banks and hits 8Ball Earth into the Corner pocket Ouch

      Mike Tyson says, "Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face."

      I did not know Tyson was a military scholar.

      Kein Operationsplan reicht mit einiger Sicherheit über das erste Zusammentreffen mit der feindlichen Hauptmacht hinaus. ~ Helmuth von Moltke, 1871

      No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces.

  6. MachDiamond Silver badge

    The subtle approach

    To get the right nudge with an impactor, it has to hit in the right place and in the right direction. There should also be lots of development along the lines of something that lands, bolts itself down and fires off a rocket motor. It would be a good test of a nuclear motor since we wouldn't care so much about any fallout.

    A big rock IS a big problem, but a smaller rock hitting in the wrong place can be just as bad. Not only would a large city getting obliterated be felt worldwide, so would a hit someplace such as Yellowstone or Iceland that triggers a major volcanic event. A good smack on the San Andreas fault could send part of California off into the sunset.

    DART will be very interesting to see the results from. Let's hope they get reported and it's not buried under the latest "Dancing" headlines. These sorts of projects are what government should be working on with out tax money and sharing all of the R&D with industry that goes into the projects.

    1. ChoHag Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: The subtle approach

      > with out tax money

      Hear hear!

    2. Version 1.0 Silver badge
      WTF?

      Re: The subtle approach

      A decent size impact or volcanic eruption could "solve" the current climatic issues ... we've been seeing the temperatures go up for nearly 100 years now and have seen not even a reasonably small asteroid strike or substantial volcanic eruption affecting the world.

      I'm not saying that we haven't created climate change but I just wonder about the things we've seen in the past that are not happening now ... there's the potential for a big change, we might be able to stop an asteroid strike but we have virtually no control over volcanoes.

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: The subtle approach

        "we have virtually no control over volcanoes."

        I don't know about that. Drill a well placed hole in Mauna Loa and drop in a small nuke and the Big Island might get a full resurfacing. The same could happen in Iceland. I have no confidence we could turn off an eruption.

        These aren't experiments I want to see run, BTW.

    3. veti Silver badge

      Re: The subtle approach

      Rocket motors are huge, expensive and heavy. Worse, they require fuel, which is even more expensive and heavier. I'm pretty sure that simply ramming into the thing is going to give a far better momentum-change-per-buck than any attempt to attach motors.

      1. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: The subtle approach

        "Rocket motors are huge, expensive and heavy. Worse, they require fuel,"

        That's why my thoughts are directed towards nuclear propulsion and not chemical. Using an impactor is a technique, but you'd need the time to do it and a fair stock of impactors depending on how much work you needed to do. There is more control with a rocket motor too. The more tools you have, the more choices you have.

    4. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

      Re: The subtle approach

      These sorts of projects are what government should be working on with out tax money and sharing all of the R&D with industry that goes into the projects. ...... MachDiamond

      Government can only survive and prosper with tax money. It is there only Modus Operandi/Vivendi .... which is anybody else's or everbody else's money. It makes you wonder what their masterplan is whenever they announce they are going to cut taxes.

      Maybe they have access to a vast forest of those Magic Money Trees?

    5. LybsterRoy Silver badge

      Re: The subtle approach

      "A good smack on the San Andreas fault could send part of California off into the sunset."

      Any other positive consequences?

      1. Tom 7

        Re: The subtle approach

        If theres enough stress in the fault and the roid is big enough it could rip all the way up and round to Alaska. You can still see dead forests in Oregon from one that went off in 1700 that goes magnitude 8-9 every 450 yrs or so so it might be tensioned enough to blue screens all over Redmond.

        This may seem far fetched but they're digging up fossils that died the day of Chicxulub simply from the earthquake waves from over 2000 miles away. Something like that would unzip any stresses faults worldwide!

      2. MachDiamond Silver badge

        Re: The subtle approach

        "Any other positive consequences?"

        Good grief, mate! Greedy much?

  7. Winkypop Silver badge
    Alien

    Space weevil habitat!

    Save the Weevils!

  8. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    What could possibly go wrong ignoring unforeseen events presenting unavoidable consequences?

    Only large rocks, hundreds to thousands of meters across, close to Earth may pose a risk. Asteroids tumble aimlessly and are locked in stable orbits unless they're disturbed by gravitational interactions with other objects or sunlight, which can change their speed and knock them out of place. Then they can suddenly veer off course and be put on a path towards collision.

    What a very accurate, politically correct APT analogy for current present day, future unfolding revolutionary, quantum evolutionary events and developments exploring and exploiting and expanding and exhausting exclusive rights privileges to real time materialised, remote physicalised presence play available to Metaversatile Omniverse Pioneers/Live Operational Virtual Environmentalists/Remote Private and Pirate Cyber IntelAIgent Systems Operators alike ...... in Data Centric Computing Systems Building and Operating Divine Attack and Diabolical Defence Forces and Sources for Virtual Worlds.

    I suppose now you'll be wanting some sort of proof of concept of the above which doesn't enjoy itself crashing into and smashing to smithereens any of your own present day 0day reality models/exclusive elite executive new world order operating systems which, if relying on the survival of investing bankers for future funding, is catastrophically vulnerable to almighty novel defeat and ancient and postmodern systems overthrow should their intelligence services fail them with future unforeseen presenting opportunities being offered to them for AIMentoring and Monitoring studiously ignored and/or silently declined.

    I Kid U Not ..... for such is the Real Live Remote Current State of Greater IntelAIgent Games and Great Game Play on Earth today.

    So what's it to be with the flight of that very specific rocky vehicle ...... constructive and creative engagement for soft merciful touchdowns or a whole series of hard crushing crash landings delivering devastating defeats, and for a chosen few who may be many, worthy earned irreconcilable despair.

    The DART impact will temporarily slow Dimorphos down, changing its orbital track.

    "It will change its speed by just a hair, much less than one per cent." ....the change may be subtle but it will alter the asteroid's trajectory forever.

    :-) Is that much less than one per cent further supporting evidence of the paralleling politically correct analogy suggested above whenever one considers this undeniable current news already out there elsewhere .....

    Although the following was written elsewhere and is specifically referring to the Federal Reserve and the US, the antics of the Bank of England and the Conservative Party [which in a nation of 68,672,682 has a membership of only 200,00 and is therefore only 0.29% of the population] is similarly, equalling appalling. It does make one wonder why on Earth such is tolerated whenever politics so easily proves itself such an ass.

    They know exactly what they are doing. The “experts” that run the Federal Reserve know that if they dramatically hike interest rates it will cause countless American workers to lose their jobs and it will absolutely crush the housing market. And even though those two things are already starting to happen, they just announced another massive rate hike. If there was a school for central bankers, one of the very first things that they would teach you is that you should never, ever raise rates as an economy is plunging into a recession. Every Fed official knows what has happened in the past when rates have been hiked at the beginning of an economic slowdown, but they are doing it anyway. To call this “economic malpractice” would be a major understatement, and the American people should be deeply alarmed about what they are doing to us. ..... https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/have-they-gone-completely-mad-they-know-they-are-killing-economy-they-are-doing-it-anyway

  9. artificial bitterness

    Giant rubber balls in space

    Because everyone knows you can transfer more momentum by bouncing than just colliding. Giant rubber balls in space, please!

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: Giant rubber balls in space

      Yes, but imagine the irony of humanity wiped out by our own rubber ball returning all of the momentum?

    2. Little Mouse

      Re: Giant rubber balls in space

      Another Philae lander perhaps? That little dude bounced all over the place.

    3. Tom 7

      Re: Giant rubber balls in space

      Everything You wanted to know about sex and were afraid to ask covered the physics necessary for that IIRC.

  10. Fruit and Nutcase Silver badge
    Joke

    You are going to need a bigger DART

    Something like this...

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/19.10.85_Howth_8329_%285958139220%29.jpg

    Can a Falcon Heavy lob one or two of those into space?

    1. Potemkine! Silver badge

      Re: You are going to need a bigger DART

      I rarely saw a vehicle with such a poor aerodynamic design.

      == Bring us Dabbsy back! ==

    2. MachDiamond Silver badge

      Re: You are going to need a bigger DART

      "Can a Falcon Heavy lob one or two of those into space?"

      The bigger question would be "is there a F9H available?"

      SpaceX has only launched 3 and one had the original Roadster that should have gone to Martin Eberhard. Two more are in the schedule, but I doubt there's inventory on hand. SpaceX could likely prep and launch 3 F9's much more quickly.

  11. Mark Exclamation

    Damnit! Missed by THAT much!

  12. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "The DART impact will temporarily slow Dimorphos down, changing its orbital track."

    Temporarily? How would it get back up to speed?

    1. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

      "Temporarily? How would it get back up to speed?"

      Assuming it's currently in a stable orbit, it'll lose a bit of speed from the impact, and fall inwards towards Didymos, where it will again pick up speed according to the law of conservation of angular momentum (consider both objects as one system in this context and imagine the spinning ice skater pulling in their arms to go faster, L=mvr).

      It will be in a new orbit however and won't return to its original orbit - which is the whole point of the experiment.

  13. Adair Silver badge

    Hopefully ...

    Dimorphos isn't a camouflaged alien observation probe.

    Nah, that kind of thing only happens in movies.

  14. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    "At four hours prior to impact, the spacecraft becomes completely autonomous,"

    and it's last thought before impact is "Oh no! Not again"

  15. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

    DART

    DART? Not BRUCE?

    Big Rock Under Control Efficiently.

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge

      Re: DART

      It should have been DRAT.

      As in "drat, drat, and double drat!" uttered buy Dick Dastardly...

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