An Asteroid With Our Name on It

Note from Ned–
LOL. Always happy to oblige, Lawrence. (For new visitors to this blog, the doom-and-gloom Lawrence mentions has been a running joke.) I’ll work the black hole angle as hard as I can. But I want to be on the record: I never brought up the Mayan calendar.

I prefer to ‘dodge’ that one if I could….lol

One of the most recent hypotheses out now is that a comet hit Canada about 13000 years ago, resulting in the extinction of the north american megafauna (mammoths, mastadons, giant ground sloths, etc) and put an end to the Clovis culture. And another one possibly hit about 34,000 years ago. Interesting stuff.

Back in June, I sent my idea below to former Astronaut Rusty Schweiker, who heads the B612 project regarding this topic.
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On Sat, 16 Jun 2007 21:14:08 -0400, wrote:
I read an article on ABC News web site last month describing the work of
B612.
Now that it’s established that sunlight alters the tumbling of asteroids, it seems to me that the fastest-response and most cost-effective deployable system to prevent an Earth collision, is to develop a “detect and deflect” system.
This would involve launching a space-based long range asteroid detection system.
In addition, a “space mirror / laser or several” that could target an impending collision, and deflect the asteroid using sun-reflected or energy-charged highly-focused / laser-aligned directed light beam(s).
This deflection might only be slight, but if the distance remains far enough away, a slight deflection is all that is needed to change the angle enough to avoid a collision.
Such a system would quite literally give us a “speed of light” reaction time. No waiting for a launch window, no waiting years to intercept.
Anyone who has ever toyed with a cat chasing a mirror-reflected beam of light knows “the lightbeam always wins!”
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Below was Rusty Schweiker’s response.
Thanks for your idea. The use of mirrors and lasers for deflection has been (and is being) looked at. The devil is in the details and it is far more complicated than you have envisioned. At the moment (and for decades, in all likelihood) it will remain less cost-effective and practical than other techniques. B612
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IMO, I was blown off by B612 for a “more expensive” solution, that will take far longer to execute, and a lot more people will make a lot of money.

Ned, the Mayan calendar was my contribution to the doom-and-gloom scenario. I wonder what’s worse, knowing when the end will come or being blind-sided by it?
I also have a question about the mirror-in-space idea to deflect an asteroid, namely, won’t there be a Newtonian reaction against the spacecraft that bears the mirror? If sunlight can deflect the asteroid, wouldn’t it also deflect the spacecraft?

Yea, the Mayan calender is Andy’s fault. Thats an excellent question Andy, one worth looking into. Though, with thrusters, I think it can be over come, but then we’d have to keep it fueled. And even then, we’d have to deflect it in a way that we don’t cause it to just come back in the future.

One of my favorite columnists from the Chicago Sun-Times, Zay N. Smith, often writes in his “Quick Takes” column about such celestial near-misses as this one, so I can’t say I haven’t heard of something like this before. But Ned, Lawrence is absolutely right: can’t you give us a warm, uplifting scientific story about puppies or kittens which doesn’t end in near-cataclysmic destruction?