Tomas Martin @ 22-12-2007
If you’ve watched Deep Impact and Armageddon a hundred times and still want to know what a real asteroid impact would look like, mark January 30th 2008 on your calenders. On that date, the path of Asteroid 2007 WD5 passes perilously close to our neighbour Mars and may or may not hit it.
The NEO (near-earth object) was found in November and marked because it also passes close to Earth. Analysis of its path say there’s a 1 in 75 chance the 50m rock will impact on the red planet, causing a crater up to half a mile wide.
[via Chris Mckitterick, image by NASA]
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Tomas Martin @ 10-10-2007
Last week here on Futurismic there were some great comments over the future of space seen from a resource rather than an expedition point of view. I mentioned in my post my hope that asteroids may in future be a good source of precious metals such as platinum. Today I stumbled across an example of how that may be done. Aside from the cheesy music and voiceover, this video from Space.Com shows Nasa planning of how to utilise the new Orion Moon landers to travel to Asteroids passing near to Earth’s orbit. By combining this style of approach with a few unmanned surveys of the composition of the NEO (near earth object), it may be possible to start harvesting precious metals that even a few tons would greatly increase current levels.
[via chris mckitterick, image by Don Eastwood]
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Edward Willett @ 09-10-2007
The best way to deflect incoming asteroids? Forget nuclear blasts, "gravity tractors" or Bruce Willis or Clint Eastwood in a souped-up space shuttle: according to a new study at the University of Glasgow, focusing sunlight onto an asteroid with space-based mirrors is the way to go.
Mind you, it would take 5000 space mirrors to fend off something of the size the killed off the dinosaurs–more than five kilometres across–but you wouldn’t need nearly as many for smaller ones. (Via New Scientist Space.)
Other options considered in the study: ramming a spacecraft into the asteroid at high speed, digging up pieces of it and shooting them off into space, attaching a thruster, or painting one side to cause trajectory-deflecting uneven heat radiation. (Illustration: M Vasile et al, University of Glasgow.)
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