Space is a hazardous place and the little ball of rock we call home faces a constant threat - asteroid strike. Luckily, a team of British scientists have designed a special space craft capable of shifting the path of an asteroid to prevent a devastating collision.
Their invention, called a "gravity tractor", would be sent about 20 years in advance to meet any rock detected to be on a collision course with Earth and fly alongside it, just 160ft from its surface. Since all objects with mass exert a gravitational effect, the 10 ton craft would draw the rock towards it and over several years change the course of the asteroid so it whizzes harmlessly by.
Floating around in the asteroid 'shooting gallery' of space makes it just a matter of time until the design may be called to action and built to tackle asteroids up to 430 yards across - big enough to release 100,000 times more energy than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945. NASA are so edgy about the whole thing they have an expensive programme intent on keeping track of every object that might come close. Here's an interesting situation though - What if we were only able to shift the asteroid so it hits one place rather than another?
Settle that people of Earth!?
Their invention, called a "gravity tractor", would be sent about 20 years in advance to meet any rock detected to be on a collision course with Earth and fly alongside it, just 160ft from its surface. Since all objects with mass exert a gravitational effect, the 10 ton craft would draw the rock towards it and over several years change the course of the asteroid so it whizzes harmlessly by.
Floating around in the asteroid 'shooting gallery' of space makes it just a matter of time until the design may be called to action and built to tackle asteroids up to 430 yards across - big enough to release 100,000 times more energy than the nuclear bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945. NASA are so edgy about the whole thing they have an expensive programme intent on keeping track of every object that might come close. Here's an interesting situation though - What if we were only able to shift the asteroid so it hits one place rather than another?
Settle that people of Earth!?
Image: matt.ohara -Flickr
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2 comments:
Interesting post. Check out this video from KQED (http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/asteroid-hunters) in San Francisco that explains how Near Earth Objects (NEO) are located and tracked, like astronomers at Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland, CA are doing. The video has great animations to explain how a “gravity tractor” works. They also talk about an asteroid that may hit Earth in 2029.
I have to say that given the NASA Mars Lander imperial/metric system gaff, I am not fully confident that we could successfully programme such a craft with the specificity needed for it to do much more than cost an obscene amount of money.
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