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UCLA-led study of NASAβs DART mission determines that the strategy presents previously unanticipated risks
Unanticipated? Really? It was the very first thing that crossed my mind when I heard about DART - what happens to all the bits that break off?
Maybe I should give NASA a call... ;-)
Yeah, seems pretty unlikely NASA scientists didn't predict debris from a >13,000km/hr collision of rock and half a ton of metal lol
I remember reading about this idea in the 90s when Armageddon came out.
I knew this from playing Asteroids on my Commodore 64. I donβt believe that they hadnβt considered it.
Asteroids on a Commodore 64??? That would have been dope to 11 year old me.
So by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but is this really that bad?
Like, people always freak out about "turning one falling object into many" because they would still share the same collective kinetic energy, but smaller objects are far more likely to burn up high in the atmosphere rather than penetrate for a destructive impact.
The article describes 37 boulders, each with a ~15kT kinetic energy. We have record of meteor events in this magnitude, and they aren't terribly destructive. Nor is it more than a footnote in terms of Earth's daily total energy budget; the Earth isn't going to be cooked by a meteor-swarm of this scale.
It'd seem to me that the biggest risk would actually be peppering Earth's orbital region with far smaller objects that could still damage satellites, no?
Just two things to consider: A deflection attempt at scale would generate much more debris. And peppering the atmosphere with hundreds of 15kT impactors over the course of minutes will still heat most surfaces with line of sight to the event(s) above their flash point, because you have just optimized the conversion from kinetic to radiative thermal energy.
(I blame CGI for notoriously underselling the brightness of meteors)
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