Bam! NASA spacecraft crashes into asteroid
in defense test
Associated Press,
by
Marcia Dunn
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
9/26/2022 8:00:43 PM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.— A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.
The galactic grand slam occurred at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the small space rock at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.
Telescopes around the world and in space aimed at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Though the impact was immediately obvious —
Reply 1 - Posted by:
thefield 9/26/2022 8:17:02 PM (No. 1288617)
One nuke, problem solved.
5 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
JHHolliday 9/26/2022 8:48:42 PM (No. 1288625)
Did it work? We are ok for the next hundred years but it would be nice to think my ggg grandchildren could avoid planetary annihilation.
4 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
MissNan 9/26/2022 8:49:59 PM (No. 1288626)
Thank you to the wonderful men and women at NASA for
making this possible!
13 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
mossley 9/26/2022 8:52:47 PM (No. 1288627)
#1, not exactly. First, there are serious debates on how well a nuclear device would work in space. The bulk of its destructive energy comes from super-heating the atmosphere, and there's no atmosphere in space. Even if it did work, you could have multiple fragments instead of one impact. The smaller ones might burn up in the atmosphere or you might spread the damage over a much greater area.
What people don't seem to grasp is you don't have to destroy an asteroid. At those distances, even a minute change in speed or trajectory will have a massive change over the thousands of miles it then travels to Earth. Think of aiming a rifle ever so slightly off target. Up close, you won't be too far off. A few hundred yards out, and you'll notice the mistake. Now think about it terms of thousands and thousands of miles.
13 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
chumley 9/26/2022 8:55:03 PM (No. 1288628)
Well and good, but in keeping with NASA's mission, did the Moslem asteroids feel better about themselves? Did the guidance system use diverse components? Were some of them transistors that identified as bridge rectifiers? Did the spacecraft have a rainbow flag painted on it?
9 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Trump Won 9/26/2022 8:59:55 PM (No. 1288633)
Next test should be aimed at the White House.
7 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
hershey 9/26/2022 9:38:10 PM (No. 1288648)
Not so sure about taking out an invading alien ship decelerating from warp speed, but still, pretty cool that they could hit something that small at that distance...
4 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Omen55 9/26/2022 9:55:38 PM (No. 1288656)
How many points is that?
3 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
pugetpower 9/26/2022 10:52:40 PM (No. 1288687)
Never would have happend without Joe Bidens forward thinking, and deep grasp of physics.
2 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
JimBob 9/26/2022 11:08:02 PM (No. 1288691)
"...at a harmless asteroid 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) away".
That conversion did not sound right.
Looked it up..... 1 mile = 1.609344 Kilometers
7,000,000 miles x 1.609344 km/mi = 11,265,408 Kilometers.... call it 11.3 million kilometers.
The speed conversion,
14,000 MPH (22,500 kph) is fairly close, the kph conversion number is 22,530,816 kph.
Of course these given distances and speeds are approximate, but when the MPH speed number (just the first number, not counting all the zeros) is double the 'Miles' distance number (14 vs 7) yet the kilometer distance numbers are not 'double' (22 vs 9.6), should be (22 vs 11), this should stand out like a Sore Thumb to an EDITOR or FACT CHECKER, and they should catch this.
If the 'Advocacy Press' can't get simple arithmetic correct, why should we believe them on something that is much more complicated?
As for me, I quit believing the AP many years ago.
7 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 9/27/2022 12:41:38 AM (No. 1288723)
Re #1, not likely to work and the pieces may be substantially as destructive as the whole. Most physicists and engineers think that a nuke would be ineffective.
3 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
DVC 9/27/2022 12:46:02 AM (No. 1288725)
Re #4, the nuke would "work", and most people can't grasp that the literal impact from the ultra energetic photons and X-rays from the blast would provide a lot of force even without an atmosphere, but there are very complex issues about shattering one of these things. It may then turn into what we saw on Jupiter when a comet broke up due to tidal forces of Jupiter and made five or so separate, serious impacts.
Do the same on Earth and you may have just spread the damage around, no substantive benefit.
2 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Snortleblatt 9/27/2022 2:16:55 PM (No. 1289203)
Although this is very cool, and I would have given my eye teeth to work on this project, I don't think that word, 'success' means what they think it means - or at least it's too early to claim it.
To quote from the article: " Though the impact was immediately obvious — Dart’s radio signal abruptly ceased — it will take as long as a couple of months to determine how much the asteroid’s path was changed."
If the object of the mission was to change the path of the asteroid, and that actual change was so small as to be immeasurable, the 'mission' was not necessarily a success. Sure, NASA can claim their 5th grade participation trophy, and will have learned a lot, but that doesn't mean that they actually achieved the mission goals as stated in this article. I look forward to hearing back in a couple of months that they did.
0 people like this.
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