Unrelated to the article, but wondered on your thoughts about Nasa/Dart crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. To me, it seems like trying to alter the course of a bus doing 70mph by throwing a mosquito at it, but then I'm sure they understand the math better than I do. I'm reminded of that line from Fight Club, "the illusion of safety"...
Hah! Yeah, DART is a fascinating mission. Your analogy is basically correct, but, that doesn't actually mean it's a bad idea. Y'know, if the bus is tens of millions of kilometers away from the crowd of pedestrians that it is predicted to hit, and the mosquito hits the bus at a few kilometers per second... that impact, tiny though it is, could divert the bus enough to miss the pedestrians by quite a bit, by the time it has travelled the tens of millions of kilometers to reach the pedestrians. Scale up the bus and mosquito to an asteroid and some kind of (relatively small) kinetic missile, and... yes, it should work.
Basically, everything depends on hitting the asteroid pretty early, while it is still far enough away from earth that even a tiny, tiny, tiny diversion in angle will add up to enough distance to miss earth by the time it arrives.
I mean, it's just a proof-of-concept mission, really, but the theory is fairly sound. Plus, the asteroid they hit isn't a threat to earth, and no matter what the result of the impact, it won't cause a threat to earth. So, worth doing. You don't want to be trying this kind of thing out for the first time at the last minute, with the earth at stake.
Lots of info on the Wikipedia page, which is updating as new data comes in...
Unrelated to the article, but wondered on your thoughts about Nasa/Dart crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid. To me, it seems like trying to alter the course of a bus doing 70mph by throwing a mosquito at it, but then I'm sure they understand the math better than I do. I'm reminded of that line from Fight Club, "the illusion of safety"...
Hah! Yeah, DART is a fascinating mission. Your analogy is basically correct, but, that doesn't actually mean it's a bad idea. Y'know, if the bus is tens of millions of kilometers away from the crowd of pedestrians that it is predicted to hit, and the mosquito hits the bus at a few kilometers per second... that impact, tiny though it is, could divert the bus enough to miss the pedestrians by quite a bit, by the time it has travelled the tens of millions of kilometers to reach the pedestrians. Scale up the bus and mosquito to an asteroid and some kind of (relatively small) kinetic missile, and... yes, it should work.
Basically, everything depends on hitting the asteroid pretty early, while it is still far enough away from earth that even a tiny, tiny, tiny diversion in angle will add up to enough distance to miss earth by the time it arrives.
I mean, it's just a proof-of-concept mission, really, but the theory is fairly sound. Plus, the asteroid they hit isn't a threat to earth, and no matter what the result of the impact, it won't cause a threat to earth. So, worth doing. You don't want to be trying this kind of thing out for the first time at the last minute, with the earth at stake.
Lots of info on the Wikipedia page, which is updating as new data comes in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test