OT: Space Station Fun

No, idiot. A nuke would *not* work 'with a flyby'.

You need a sustained duration push, not a flashbulb pulse.

An eximer laser can actually "punch" a dent into a missile body.

An X-Ray laser actually fires a hole into it.

Land a LARGE rocket (at the correct location) and PUSH.

You get something like hitting a bowling ball with a water hose.

A nuke gives you something like hitting a bowling ball with a BB.

MAYBE if it were a deer slug, but not a BB.

You need to transfer momentum to the rock.

MOMENTUM: look it up.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Idiot. Big force x short time = small force x long time = same change in momentum.

Yes, idiot. Momentum, not "flash splash".

Read this:

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

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Prove it.

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The goal is to change the orbit of the _totality_ of the object by 
the amount needed to miss the Earth, regardless of the velocity 
change required.  If the object isn't homogenous, and fused, 
ablation - which is a violent process which won't guarantee that the 
various masses of the object will remain contiguous - won't 
guarantee that chunks of the body will fly by. 

John Fields 

  




  
> 
>Knowing more about the structure of comets and asteroids would 
>certainly help plan the mission. Sounds like the "dirty snowball" 
>conjecture was wrong.

Europeons must buy things they hate. Looking at their homes, I guess it's not hard to believe.

Playing with one's toys that one buys by being busy and productive makes people happy, too.

' Go ahead. Prove your claims.

You really are a sad old fart.

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It's "Rendezvous", John, and while a nuke might work, the energy 
expended to move the body would be much higher if it were radiated 
externally than if the nuke was located on - site. 

John Fields

The idea is to transfer enough heat to the outer layer of the object that some large amount of it ablates at high speed. Since photons have almost no momentum, this will cause the remainder of the object to be deflected away from the blast.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

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You're the one who brought the claims to bear, so the proof is yours 
to expound. 

John Fields

John Fields is on safe grounds here. Krw doesn't understand proof or evidence, and can't do more than advance unfounded assertions.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

You're lying again.

te:

Wikipedia know-it-alls,....

an

economics is derived from long-ago lectures from somebody who through that Keynes was dangerously new-fangled, the posting was already irony-heavy.

taking the founding tax evaders seriously, and getting his economic philoso

red reactionary back them.

.

British justice is cheaper than American justice, and no whit less equitabl e.

At the moment the British government trades in pounds rather than dollars.

The point about the founding tax evaders is that they were happy to enlist radicals like Tom Paine and Ben Franklin to talk about liberty and democrac y when they were useful for motivating the cannon fodder. As soon as the fi ghting was over, Tom Paine and Ben Franklin were packed off to France, and the rich land-owners put together a constitution that put a thin veneer of democracy on a bunch of constitutional arrangements that left the people wh o owned the country free to run the country for their own advantage.

The people who own the US have had their moments of enlightened self-intere st, and spent some of the profits of the industrial revolution in making th e working classes healthier, better fed, better educated, and more producti ve, but since about 1980 (when Reagan came to power) the people that own th e USA have hung onto pretty much all the profits of continuing development and the 99% of the population don't seem to have been able to do a thing ab out it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Uno

space

This is the limit of krw's rhetorical power. He can manage bald assertion, but mastering supporting evidence is beyond him. There's nothing in his ent ire output to suggest that he knows what supporting evidence might be, but the fact that we have seen any isn't positive proof that he couldn't produc e it if sufficiently motivated.

It's usual - if you are accusing somebody of lying - to produce some kind o f evidence that their claim is false. Krw never bothers with this, and it's likely that he doesn't see the point.

krw doesn't seem to have master snipping, either.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Only if you bury it at the right depth to carve a decent sized chunk off with substantial momentum which would be the method of choice.

As Phil has pointed out you want momentum transfer - the energy that you deliver to it is a means to an end. The worry is that you turn a local very bad event into a global catastrophe if you merely break the thing into a bunch of MT fragments still on a collision course and likely to arrive spread over a few years like classic meteor streams.

Better would be modifying the things trajectory by altering its albedo or adding solar sails.

Funny world you live in where a MT blast can be directed at a 1km diameter impactor from a couple of km away. At best only 1/4/4pi = 2% of the megaton detonation will interact with the asteroid from that distance. But don't let reality interfere with your fantasies.

Even a ground burst on an asteroid won't do enough to be worthwhile you need to cleave a chunk off and do it in a controlled way so that all the resulting pieces will miss the Earth (or be small enough).

The telescopes are already quite good at it. Space is actually rather full of debris but fortunately they follow a power law distribution so that big bad ones are extremely rare. A minor snag is that they are often pitch black so that makes them harder to spot by reflected light until the start to warm up a bit inside Mars orbit.

We should give thanks that Jupiter tends to hoover them up but the odd one can still get through or end up pointed at us after a close three body encounter inside Jupiters sphere of influence.

Nobody would trust having nukes on any satellite. And rightly so.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

If it's discovered inside Mars orbit, as you say later, sails aren't going to act fast enough. I mean with the time it takes to get there it will be closer ro us than to Mars.

2% of that is more than the energy it would get from solar sails in a short period. If the thing is only months away (and they have gone un-noticed until after they have passed our orbit less than 2 million miles away) you are not going to make a difference with solar sails.

A number of X-ray LASERs could do more than solar sails without breaking up the mass as much as a surface detonation.

It doesn't have to be all the pieces. If a bomb blows off small particles then they aren't going to hurt us, and if it blows off a big chunk then one or both masses probably won't be on a collision course any more.

They wouldn't have heat shields and could easily be designed to have no chance of operating after re-entry. Their construction could be inspected by other powers. But it wouldn't be necessary to put them in orbit because if you wanted to use them on an Earth-killing asteroid then a crash program to make a lot of boosters wouldn't be too much trouble. Or just have the boosters standing by on the ground, again with frequently inspected payloads that can't work against surface targets.