NASA Puts $5 Million Towards Asteroid Detection

[mjc0961]

According to the Law of Sod, this will come online just in time to inform us a meteor the size of Greenland will hit us in 24 hours.

My faith still reside sin Bruce, our ultimate anti-asteroid defence.

I just hope we can keep Ben Affleck out of the real thing. Can't stand that guy and his shitty acting.

 

[Triforceformer]

Then do what exactly even if you have 24 hours early warning it is not like we have the tech to blow up an asteroid.America you have a larger problem than asteroids it called your 18 trillion dollars of debt that doesn't look like it will slow down any time soon you can actually do things to stop that.

You could...you know, warn the people it's going to hit? So it doesn't kill them because they left ahead of time? It's kind of obvious what you do when you get advance warning of a meteor heading to a residential area.

 

[Pinkamena]

instead of funding an ongoing project to recognize all space bodies flying towards earth that seems to be successful, nasa decides to "make their own" for as little as 5 millions. i smell attentiongrab.

The current project for mapping asteroids does not have the resolution to spot tiny meteorites like the one that hit Russia. This new project will, by only looking for meteorites that's relatively close to earth.

 

[go-10]

if only this had happened in December 21 of last year

so many Wormwood cries would've been heard and it would had been awesome

 

[RicoADF]

Personally, I'm a little more worried about something coming from said asteroids. I wouldn't be wrong in thinking that isn't entirely science fiction right? Could it be possible for bacteria to survive, perhaps inside the meteor?

Whatever the case, more asteroid detection's good news. Now we just need to work on defending our asses from the damn things...

Eh, I wouldn't worry too much about that. I mean, you did read the part where the thing exploded with the force of a nuclear bomb, right? When these things come in, they come in fast and hit really, really hard. Those aren't the sort of conditions that many bacteria (do you mean viruses? Because bacteria probably couldn't survive millions of years exposed to the icy void of space anyway) are likely to survive, and even if they did survive, it's pretty unlikely that they'd be able to infect us anyway.

Bacteria often survive on space craft to the moon and mars, their quite resiliant creatures. It's more possible than you may think, heck one theory of life starting on earth Comming from a meteor. It's unlikely, but not impossible.

 

[Therumancer]

It's interesting, but honestly I'd rather they put as much, or more, effort into an infrastructure for actually intercepting and destroying/deflecting/redirecting meteors and astroids. I say this because I'd rather we had something ready in case we DID detect a meteor the size of Greenland going to hit us, rather than going "well, here it comes, now what are we going to do?".

One of the big reasons why I've been a big fan of the space program (among many) and why I feel we've been dangerously neglectful in actually building and upgrading manned spacecraft.

I was never a huge fan of "Armageddon" but I did kind of figure that they had one bit right, and that was that we really are stupid enough to wait untilt he last second and then try and pull off some kind of crazy 11th hour save. The idea IMO is to be ready so you don't have to go scrounging for experts and launch a rag-tag band into space and hope for the best. Bruce is awesome, but I'd rather have a good dozen or so ships ready to go, the equipment pre-built, and a standing list of "guys we can send if something like this happens" to draw on.

 

[Twilight_guy]

The problem I have with this is that knowing a meteor is going to hit doesn't usually help much. It's a big meteor, we're screwed anyways since Earth is doomed. If it's small its going to need to be very accurate since it would be hard to say, evacuate an entire town that could be hit at any square mile. it would need to be accurate enough that we could evacuate a small but manageable portion of land and I don't think we have anything that accurate. I'd personally rather have an earthquake detector.

in case of big asteroids, with 24 hour warning we can launch the nuclear missiles and pray the asteroid is impacted enough to change the orbit. note here, change orbit, not be blown up, because blow up still mean it all fall down to earth and destroy us, however we want it to fly-by. our missiles are accurate enough, question is are they powerful enough?

Yes because untested and theoretical methods will save us. I'll sleep better at night knowing that we might be able to do something, maybe. Since we're not in the habit of regularly shooting asteroids, and all we have is some theories of how to deal with asteroids, why aren't we testing that somehow? This system just seems to be pointless to me. What good is early detection if our methods of what to do from that point on are sketchy at best?

Aside from that, at some point an asteroid is too big (or moving too fast) for us to do anything about no matter what we shoot at it anyways so a 'big' asteroid still means doom. it's simply a matter of what we mean by 'big'.

Earthquake detector is impossible. some earthquakes can be prognosed by detector tools we already have, some cant. its impossible to prognose these we cant prognose now, or at least we dont know of any way. asteroids on the other hand are possible to see, we just arent looking.

No its not. Earthquakes reflect the physics of the Earth. They don't come from nowhere and area result of observable forces. We just don't know how to detect them yet. I guarantee you one day we will have an Earthquake detector (or more likely we will have a system for releasing pressure between plates by causing earthquakes ourselves). They also tend to be far more common then asteroid that actually pass through the atmosphere. I'd rather have that then an asteroid detector.

 

[Strazdas]

Yes because untested and theoretical methods will save us. I'll sleep better at night knowing that we might be able to do something, maybe. Since we're not in the habit of regularly shooting asteroids, and all we have is some theories of how to deal with asteroids, why aren't we testing that somehow? This system just seems to be pointless to me. What good is early detection if our methods of what to do from that point on are sketchy at best?

Aside from that, at some point an asteroid is too big (or moving too fast) for us to do anything about no matter what we shoot at it anyways so a 'big' asteroid still means doom. it's simply a matter of what we mean by 'big'.

Intested theoretical methods are better than sitting on our asses hoping some mystical "god" will save us with his space magic.
in order to test our asteroid defence we must first see the asteroids, and this system is what sees the asteroids. if you want asteroid-defence ATLAS is the firs step.

Yes, a large enough asteroid will spell doom regardless. however asteroid os such size is likely be more attrackted to large objects due to gravity, such as Jupiter or Sun. in fact laste year we saw asteroid crashing into Jupiter and thus we had to observe jupiters atmosphere reacting. astronomers were superexited. my point is - that asteroid was big enough to exterminate humans, but Jupiter sucked it in. Jupiter is our natural defence shield.

No its not. Earthquakes reflect the physics of the Earth. They don't come from nowhere and area result of observable forces. We just don't know how to detect them yet. I guarantee you one day we will have an Earthquake detector (or more likely we will have a system for releasing pressure between plates by causing earthquakes ourselves). They also tend to be far more common then asteroid that actually pass through the atmosphere. I'd rather have that then an asteroid detector.

Eathquakes reflect physics of the earth, physics we are unable to measure and calcualte. what we have now are at best speculation as there isnt always a seismographic warning before an earthquake. Sure, one day we will have it, but "go build it" is not an option right now.

 

[Dryk]

According to the Law of Sod, this will come online just in time to inform us a meteor the size of Greenland will hit us in 24 hours.

We USUALLY know where those are already, they're not what this new system is being proposed for

 

[BoogieManFL]

Then do what exactly even if you have 24 hours early warning it is not like we have the tech to blow up an asteroid.America you have a larger problem than asteroids it called your 18 trillion dollars of debt that doesn't look like it will slow down any time soon you can actually do things to stop that.

It is obvious to me, and everyone else but you apparently, that a 24 hour warning is at least enough time for people to evacuate and emergency services to be prepared.

You think you can effectively evacuate a city in under 24 hours sorry but that is not going to happen.

A lot can be done with a day notice. And your feeble excuse seems to assume only large cities would be the danger area.

Regardless, a few thousand people escaping is better than zero.

 

[tangoprime]

Then do what exactly even if you have 24 hours early warning it is not like we have the tech to blow up an asteroid.America you have a larger problem than asteroids it called your 18 trillion dollars of debt that doesn't look like it will slow down any time soon you can actually do things to stop that.

It is obvious to me, and everyone else but you apparently, that a 24 hour warning is at least enough time for people to evacuate and emergency services to be prepared.

You think you can effectively evacuate a city in under 24 hours sorry but that is not going to happen.

How about we deal with something that really happened, like the russian meteorite blast that spurred this on. A 24 hour notice could have meant local media telling people to stay away from windows during the timeframe it was going to pass and would've saved several hundred people from being injured. But I guess considering that isn't as fun as poking americans over an economic/policy issue.