Comments on: Deep Impact interview with Brian Cox

By: stands2reason

stands2reason — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:38:37 +0000

OMG, you mean the comet didn’t implode into a fusioning star upon impact?

By: Chip

Chip — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:45:26 +0000

Hank Roberts: “Surely someoneâ€™s come up with a device that drags a net or otherwise arranges to get caught up and carried along…”

Look earlier in this thread. I have a suspicion in terms of physics that a net won’t stop an asteroid barreling in at 100 MPS relative to Earth however the idea of a large net-like screen many miles across, (you could drive a bus between the openings,) that applied a uniformly strong counterforce via a collision with the comet or asteroid, by stretching and applying equal resistance over a large surface area might actually be a viable way fo quickly altering the trajectory.

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:00:08 +0000

Suggestion for hard science fiction story, dystopian type — steal the plot of Hemingway’s ‘Old Man and the Sea’ — protagonist goes out into the deep to try to capture one of these objects and divert it into a capture orbit, but it’s friable and every attempt to nudge it nibbles away at it instead, and they bring back some tiny little remainder. For the utterly black version, the fragments shotgun the planet.

Seriously, I want to see more attention to catch-and-release technology.

Surely someone’s come up with a device that drags a net or otherwise arranges to get caught up and carried along, grabs the comet or asteroid firmly enough that a few ion engine devices can tie themselves down, network themselves, orient themselves, and then start gently steering the asteroid into a path that (with any number of ’slingshots’ or other careful path selection) will eventually bring it back into a useful orbit, maybe a leading or trailing Lagrange point.

I’d invest in that. Big payback in a few decades.

By: Paracelsus

Paracelsus — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:02:01 +0000

Dr. Cox is one of my *fave* science popularizers, up there with Dr. Sean Carroll, Dr. Carl Sagan, and the BA (of course )! I hope he starts getting a lot more air-time and press over here. His wife Gia is cool too and writes a most excellent blog.

By: Chip

Chip — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:26:11 +0000

DrFlimmer: I think the BA was referring to watching NASA’s future preventative spacecraft explode or deflect the comet, (or my giant net get punctured with no effect on its collision course.)

By: Mark Martin

Mark Martin — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:08:34 +0000

Copper was used principally on the presumption that there’s little copper, if any, in a cometary crust. The material in the impactor would be vaporised to incandescence along with a large amount of the crust. The chemical composition of the crust, measured by the emission spectrum of the collision, needs to be cleanly distinguishable from that of the impactor. By using a material not in the crust, it can be subtracted later from the spectrum.

Of course, if it had turned out the comet was nothing but a huge Lincoln penny, all bets would’ve been off.

By: DrFlimmer

DrFlimmer — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:58:05 +0000

Maybe I got you wrong, but: you really want to watch the end of the world through a telescope? I bet watching the comet in outer space will be quite incredible, but when it hits the planet, I guess I will have better things to do (maybe say “Good Bye” to my family or to my friends). But everyone must die the way he wants to – and, well, yes. Maybe it is the way you think you can “leave the world”: Holding Mrs BA and the LittleBA in your arms while you look through the ’skope! Thats the way the BA will end .