ESA starts work on planetary defence mission, because Bruce Willis is retired The European Space Agency has begun work on a planetary defence mission that will intercept an asteroid predicted to come within 32,000km of Earth in 2029. The Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (RAMSES) mission targets asteroid 99942, aka Apophis, which is about 375 meters wide – the length of 30 giant squid – and …
Seems to me that, in the next five millennia, we will have colonized our solar system and we'll have been mining those asteroids for quite some time. Given that we'll likely start with the larger ones, there's a chance that that next chunk of space rock supposed to hit us will, by then, have been reduced to ores and completely processed.
But, in case we get a bad surprise before then, it's always good to get more data on asteroids, so go RAMSES !
An obvious hypothesis - as and when we do start asteroid mining for profit; enterprising individuals with engines available ON said roids are a very obvious means of carrying out sci-fi hyper-mega-blackmail on global scale.
There's a whole expansion to the board game High Frontier dedicated to the misuse of space colonisation/exploration capability for profit through destruction.
"... the ESA ... added that another rock of this size typically would not approach so closely for another 5,000 to 10,000 years."
Yes, but they aren't the ones we have to worry about.
The ones we have to worry about are the very much bigger ones that we haven't found yet.
There are *relatively* few of those, but being a lot bigger they will be much harder to deflect. And any one of them, impacting anywhere on the planet, will ruin your whole millennium.
So instead of doing something useful, Russia decides to try to steal some land from its neighbour. Like that's going to help.
Nah. I saw the documentary on how Bruce Willis and his team sorted out the big asteroid last time round. They'll be able to do it again. Even if Bruce isn't fit to go into space any more. For one thing, Ben Affleck will have plenty of time on his hands for another mission now he's no longer shagging J-Lo.
> 375 meters wide – the length of 30 giant squid
I'm unhappy with this, there is not enough information about the squid used to make accurate predictions using monte carlo analysis. So I'm going to convert it to a more manageable 68 to 88 giraffes.
Background information:
male giraffes range from 4.8-5.5 m tall
female giraffes range from 4.3 to 4.8 m tall
I'm going to change "375 meters wide" to "375 meters tall", so about 68 to 88 standard giraffe units!
The icon is me using a slide ruler.
Mass: 61000000000 kilograms (assumed) according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis
so 40666666.6667 skateboarding rhinos according to https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html
The real problem is that you can not calculate it's exact mass until it interacts with other objects of known mass.
Glad you mentioned that. PTV have diverged from their standard rhinos-on-skateboards metric; that seems to be for trams only. For buses, the units are hippos on rollerskates.
Hmm. Geosync orbit is... 36,000 km. (Ok, 35,800 km. Close enough for government work.) That bad boy is going to be inside Clarke Orbit radius! (Named for Arthur C. Clarke, OBE, RAF (ret), SF author, SF commentator, movie maker (2001...) and long-time resident in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. (And, for the morons who care, very well known gay guy. There may be a reason why he moved to Ceylon in 1956 and stayed.)) Inside Clarke Orbit is also known as Way Too Damn Close. Time to break out the Messiah from Deep Impact, a much better asteroid movie than Willis Swill. (Deep Impact also had Morgan Freeman as the US Pres. Can we get Mr. Freeman to run for office this year? Please?)
Arthur Clarke is the person who first noticed that if you hang three satellites at 36,000 km altitude and 120 degrees from each other they would give 100% total coverage of the Earth's surface. Others had noticed geosync before him. Clarke was a radar and radio guy and noticed a way to make geosync useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
What would be needed if someone has to do something about a big fast moving rock wouldn't be a few oil rig workers, it would be Messiah, or, better, Michael. Here's Micheal. https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FiSvNberQMAwYCqwJwU3wGr0M9mPhWzgsIgMwKtYe7EE.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D67577ce564f8d5bfaab158bd2728e2ceb579998e
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