Would humans be able to shoot down an asteroid headed for earth yet?

Do you not know where you are?
nice trips tho

...

>Do you not know where you are?
Veeky Forums?

Impacts that are over 1km occur once every 500,000 years. Impacts over 10km are nigh impossible.

Neither would completely wipe out human life.

There is currently no ways to stop relativistic kill vehicles(time bomb)

Though they would both have global impacts, and the latter would probably wipe out 98% of humans.

Those asteroids are cataloged, NASA says al but 70 have been found.
nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html

Assuming US effort alone I'd guess around 1000 tons of equipment/fuel to LEO in one year with at least some effort. Most of the work will likely have to be done using falcon 9's and whatever other LV's the others can scramble. With that tonnage, and keeping in mind tsar bomba - 50mt - weighs about 25 tons it should be doable to lift enough nukes and fuel to deflect or destroy some reasonable asteroids.

If it is dwarf planet all is kill though.

Same if it's interstellar smallish rock simply because it probably won't be detected until it hits us.

Yes. Not r/science. Fag.

If we detect it early enough there's numerous ways we can redirect it with present technologies. The further out it is, the less push it needs to change it's course.
Grapple and thrust, kinetic impactor, gravity tug, laser ablation, light pressure, bombs, etc. The only trick is catching it with enough time to prepare a mission.

The main danger now is asteroids that orbit between the Earth and the sun. There's not as many of them, but when the sun is behind them we can't detect them.
Just like how a fighter pilot might use the sun to hide his approach from his target.

>Grapple and thrust, kinetic impactor, gravity tug, laser ablation, light pressure, bombs, etc.

wtf what does this even look like? gravity tug an asteroid????

I don't know about all these optimistic solutions. There's so much that can go wrong with it practically

It means you use the spacecraft's own tiny gravity well to alter the course of the asteroid over time.

I think I should have called it gravity tractor not gravity tug, but you get the idea.

Nukes are extremely ineffective at destruction in space. They spread radiation a lot further, so they are better at killing life, but most of the destructive kinetic force of a nuke comes from superheated atmosphere. So, unless you can somehow bury the nuke deep inside the asteroid, closing up the hole you made in the process, all you're really going to do is make it hotter, which won't affect its mass much.

If we catch it REALLY far away, you can simply paint one side of it white, and the sun will do the rest for ya, how far that would be would depend on its rotation, size, and trajectory - but if we wanted to deflect, for instance, Apophis, and started about 15 years ago (bit before we first saw it), we coulda theoretically done it.

The next best bet is a gravity assist, but that requires nearly as much warning. It'd be more effort, as you'd need to take a heavy satellite and get it to orbit the asteroid synchronously.

A kinetic driver probe would be heavier still, but could be used later. In this case, tossing a heavy object at the asteroid at high speed is actually more effective than a nuclear bomb. We'd still need quite a bit of warning, as the delivery system to divert an asteroid large enough to be a threat would be larger than anything we've ever made, and we'd probably only get one shot at it. If you're really lucky there maybe another asteroid available to use in a similar effort - play some billiards.

Problem is, a lot of rocks are non-reflective, covered with carbon and other dust, and thus you don't get to see them that far away. Two asteroids larger than the KT event asteroid passed between us and the moon in the 90's, and we didn't detect them until after they were gone. We find, on average, twenty dangerous near earth objects every year, and that number has only been increasing as our scanning ability improves, but we know from the gravitational patterns we've only detected a fraction of those traveling about the inner solar system.

jesus that webm, its a fragile reality

>In this case, tossing a heavy object at the asteroid at high speed is actually more effective than a nuclear bomb.
Since getting a whole lotta weight into orbit quickly is hard (impossible, really, we just don't have the infrastructure in place), I'm thinking the ideal solution is to attach rockets to the ISS and/or Tiangong-1 and throw them at the thing. (~500 tons, and 10 tons, respectively.) Took years to get all that stuff up there - and while it would take a lotta rockets to pull them out of orbit and toss them into something, it'd probably be doable with the sort of rockets we've already designed and tested - and a lot less rockets than it would take to get that equivalent weight up there again.

No idea if anyone's ever run the numbers on something like that, or what sorta suicide mission might be involved in hooking big boosters to those things without having them fall to pieces and scatter before they reached the target... But one would think a 500 ton impact would be damned impressive, even against a dino-killer sized asteroid.

The sad thing is, they are among the less likely things to kill us, and with a lot of those other possibilities you get no warning. The more I've looked into apocalypse scenarios, the more I think the closest thing to evidence of the divine we have, is that there's only been five global extinction events, and not five million.

Oh you're christ fag, that's unfortunate, Merely 5 extinction events must mean there is a god after all.

>christ fag
Nah, but seriously it is pretty incredible. We seem to discover two or three new possible species extinctions every decade (both foreign and domestic), and every now and again, we invent a new one for ourselves.

I suppose you could just apply anthropic principle "if we weren't this lucky we wouldn't be here to talk about it". Could be that there were a lot of other instances of life elsewhere that weren't so lucky, and we just happen to be on a lottery winning rock for long enough to begin to get some understanding of how lucky we've been.

Hopefully that same luck holds out long enough for us to do something to increase our odds.

>Hopefully that same luck holds out long enough for us to do something to increase our odds.

> asteroid heading to earth
> humanity will go extinct if it hits
> elon musk promises to stop it
> gets a huge amount of funding from billionaires
> makes huge amount of rockets capable of leaving earth's orbit
> gets enormous amount of supplies
> sends all of his rockets to mars
> has his billionaire funders and friends in the rockets
> turns out those supplies were used for making a mars base/city
> watches as asteroid hits earth from the deck of his mars mansion
> musk's face when

Yeah I think everyone takes this shit too seriously, we're living ona big blue ball in space that's fucked up, ephemeral.

I saw this todya

youtube.com/watch?v=oFHVkdxSzTM

If we detect it on time, we could send a missile to intercept it.
Question is if the payload is strong enough to blow it up, and if it does you still have the debris to worry about if it's a big one.
I don't think we have strong enough missiles so we're pretty fucked mate.

Not if Luke Skywalker flies an X wing through it

>Yes. Not r/science. Fag.
There's nothing scientific or mathematical about homophobia.

>Make the scattered fragments radioactive
Brilliant idea user.

Bomb the shit out of it. President Trump will rise from the ashes and make EARTH habitable again.

Dinosaurs BTFO

t. /b/tard

That's and all, but you're still a fag.

If you detect it early enough... to do what, exactly?

We don't have rockets at the ready to go interplanetary. So you could detect it out at Pluto's orbit, and you would have to modify something we have now. And launch it from Earth. It would take time to intercept. The rocket probably can't reach speeds much different than the incoming's, so they'll meet halfway at best (after teh rocket has been modified). Rocket mods haven't been tested. Say they're okay. Approach speeds are absurd, unless you carry the fuel needed to slow down (huge mass) - can't land and place a rocket for controlled nudging, so maybe explosion works. Don't know composition/structure. Would it nudge (enough)? Break apart and re-coalesce?

I can't follow what you're saying
the easiest way to stop a collision isn't to blow up the object or stop it completely but to change its course
because of inertia, the longer the amount of time you have to change something's course, the easier it is

this is the biggest reason we need to start colonizing the rest of the solar system ASAP