Seriously, Kurt, I'm not a mathematician, programmer, engineer or scientist by trade, but it seems to me that you need higher precision to hit the center of mass for an accurate deflection, than a "good enough" hit with an old-fashioned, '60s era mega-nuke warhead (or two, or three, or ?). "Close counts in horseshoes and atom bombs" or something like that, didn't the phrase go? But more likely is that the bomb will be soft-landed. (What was that remarkable little spacecraft that soft- landed on an asteroid recently?) We certainly don't need to hit it at closest approach. Let's pop that baby when it's WAY out there, to let the fragments disperse more widely if it's not completely vaporized. Remember "Here come the whale chunks!"? Heck, I'll only be 71, still lots of life ahead of me... --- Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
--- Chuck Hards <chuckhards@yahoo.com> wrote:
This rock is 320 (m)eters in diameter, right, not (m)iles?
Per Schweickart letter's to NASA Administrator Griffin, "Based on current data, the asteroid (320-400 meter diameter) will pass approximately 7,000 km inside the geostationary orbit and will be an easily visible naked eye object to observers in Europe and Africa early that evening [on 4/13/2029]." http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=161
If it were miles, the title to this thread would have been "Should 2004MN4 - be named the 11th planet Xena - or just 'The End of the World?" and I'd have already quit my job for extended period of debauchery. -:)
Wouldn't it be just as easy (technically) to vaporize it completely than deflect it with certainty?
Finally, a use for all that Cold War hardware!
Considering the track record of Star Wars tests, do you really want to trust DARPA? I mean, this asteriod isn't going to have homing beacon on it like the Star Wars mock-ICBM test targets - to make sure the test goes well.
Opps, well, er --- maybe Schweickart does have a point. Maybe we do need a homing beacon on it.
- Canopus56(Kurt)
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