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Science

UK Govt Plans To Set Up 'Armageddon' Centre 54

Posted by Hemos from the protect-us-from-danger dept.
Scott Manley writes "According to the Sunday Times, and the BBC the UK government is putting together a task force to advise the government on Extraterrestrial hazards. Professor Mark Bailey has been campaigning for this for a long time - and it seems timely for such a thing after his staff at Armagh Observatory made the first accurate prediction of a meteor shower. "
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UK Govt Plans To Set Up 'Armageddon' Centre More

UK Govt Plans To Set Up 'Armageddon' Centre

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  • That's just like the British Governemt.... If they don't understand it, they'll hide from it. Sopunds a bit like the internet to me...
  • Their primary concern is whether it will hit on UK territory? I may be wrong, but as far as I know a meteor hitting earth can either be too small to detect in advance (at least without enough warning time to do anything), or - if its bigger - it doesnt matter too much whether it actually drops on the UK or somewhere else.

    Anyway, it sounds like a nice job to apply for... You can blurt out all bullshit you want, and if you actually go wrong there wont be anyone left to blame you. :-)
  • Looks like they're jealous of all the silly ways
    the US Govt wastes money, and are trying to play
    catch up :) I wonder if they'll call it UNIT..
  • Sounds like almost all governements. At least they're doing something now. How many other countries are? Not many, AFAIK.

  • An actual _good_ use of tax dollars (Score:4)

    by xtal ( 49134 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @04:40AM (#1497788)

    Finally, governments that might actually, maybe, get it :). It strikes me that this is something that the United Nations should fund, as the implications and benefits of any work into researching Near Earth Objects. JPL is associated with some work into this: Check out the Near Earth Asteroid Tracking [nasa.gov] program (NEAT).

    Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.

    One way to look at it is a great big life insurance program for Human Civilization - the payments aren't high, the work can be largely automated, and if the program ever pays off, there is no way to measure the value of the endeavor! :)

    Too bad the US wouldn't shovel some more bucks into NEAT, but, we'll see what international competition can do.

    Kudos..

  • A waste of money?! I hope you'll take that back when they inform you you have aproximately 2 years before a large rock flattens your house.
  • I guess that's one "new labour" way to spend the ever increasing fuel tax they're squeezing out of us!

    Personally, I'd rather they spend the money to bring back Dr. Who...
  • Mark my word, they're only doing this so they could get rid of Bruce Willis. (And I don't blame them).

  • It's a daft idea (Score:4)

    by ralphclark ( 11346 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @04:55AM (#1497792) Journal
    With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum. After all, how much money did the US spend on Star Wars? And with so little to show for it in the end.

    We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.

    Besides, it would be a blast.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Some people think of this as a waste of money, but we are the first species to get to the point where we can prevent our own (eventual) cosmic reset button from being set.

    I guess that all depends on the size of the object coming in our direction. If its large enough, there's very little we can do except put our heads bewteen our legs and kiss our arses goodbye ;)

    But you are right, it is a sensible thing to spend money on. We might just be able to buy ourselves some time to find a solution, if we spot things early enough.

  • You can't mix politics and logic in an argument. They have no relationship with each other.

    And we don't need manned exploration, just exploration and development through whatever techniques are appropriate.

  • Welll britain is quite small but you have to rememebr that even a small (500 metre) object can have global effects. The UK sits right next to the atlantic - a Tsunami would not be good for it.
  • This sounds like a typical knee-jerk reaction so the elected officials can say they are doing something. And, realistically, the effort isn't going to do a whole lot. If a big rock hits anywhere, the whole planet is screwed. There have been 5 mass extictions, why can't there be a 6th?

    We see some meteors, hey lets form a body to find some that might hit us. (Ok so you are tracking them, now what you going to do?!?!? Go up there and ask it to swerve and hit the IRA?)

    Here in the USA, someone shoots up a postoffice and so now it's illegal to have a gun in a postoffice. Nevermind that its illegal to shoot people, to hide a gun, to discharge a firearm in city limits, etc *WE* (the elected officials) have done something.

    I guess we get the governments we deserve eh?
  • The sunday times URL is "www.sunday-times.co.uk"
  • If you can deflect an massive object even by a very small amount (say, a half-decent nuke set off on the surface of one side) wouldn't that be enough to change its path so that it doesn't hit the earth? If you deflect it early enough, it only has to move by a few earth radii (very small in astronomical terms) in order to miss the earth.

  • You did actually read the article right? It quite clearly states the minister in charge wants to set up this study group to work out the probabilities/possibilities involved, initially locally but he also said he thinks there should be a global programme to deal with the "big guys".

  • Yes, you are correct. But that all depends on us being able to get a nuke up there, finding the correct position, and not blowing it into lots of city-crushing sized chunks when it goes off. Given NASA's recent problems with caluclating orbits, I won't say I'd be a hundred percent convinced of its success. But I guess it's our best option, for now.

    Of course, if we had warp field technology, we could just wrap a low level warp bubble around it and shove it out the way with a pea shooter. Or we could ask Q to change the gravitational constant of the universe ;)
  • The UK Minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury (yes, Lords are still allowed in the government without being elected) was interviewed about this on BBC Radio 4's morning current affairs show 'Today'. There was a clip from Mark Bailey (describing the threat and potential solutions with admirable clairy), then the Lord Sainsbury interview.

    Real Audio link [bbc.co.uk] to the whole (3 hour) program. The interview occurs at elapsed time 2:19:00, about 80% through the program. (I can't stand McGregor so can't bear to listen through it again ...)

    It was rather embarrassing, as I recall; he was interviewed by (IMHO) the most irritatingly fluff-headed presenter on the show, Sue McGregor, who asked stupid questions, didn't listen to the answers, then asked further stupid questions which had already been dealt with ("How do you tell meteors and comets and so on to buzz off ?") The morning I hear her interviewing an Open Source personality is the morning my head explodes. (No change there, then.)

    The gist of what he was saying was that the reports are way ahead of themselves; he has asked Mark Bailey et al for a list of recommended experts in the field, with the intention of investigating the actual threat and then recommending appropriate action, if any. The establishment of a permanent study group is one possibility that may come out of this process.


    --

  • There is almost no chance of doing anything about it at the last minute. However, for asteroid impacts, unlike say, comets on a near parabolic orbit we may have years of advance warning if we could plot the orbits accurately enough.

    Sure these things are hugely massive, and travelling at enormous speeds. However, they are also aiming at a (comparatively) tiny target from way off. A small delta-v might well be enough to deflect them off course. It must be true, I saw it on Star Trek!

    In any case, the only issue we need to be thinking about is when not if it will be practical to build such systems. Giving a few k$ to do a feasability study, against a saving potentially in the G$ (or higher) range makes complete sense.

  • We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.

    But monitoring the asteroids when they are in the asteroid belt will do no good whatsoever. They are all in chaotic orbits, so current observations don't allow us to predict their future paths.

    Phil

  • Yes, you are correct. But that all depends on us being able to get a nuke up there, finding the correct position, and not blowing it into lots of city-crushing sized chunks when it goes off. Given NASA's recent problems with caluclating orbits, I won't say I'd be a hundred percent convinced of its success.
    NASA had no problems with calculating orbits; they had a problem with unit conversions due to a supplier's use of the English system (IOW, it's all you damn Brits' fault! ;-).

    If you go back a little ways in the BBC Sci/Tech material, you'll find an article about the properties of asteroids. Specifically, they are not solid; they are loose aggregates of fluff, and when something hits them they compress instead of shattering. This indicates that the likely response of an asteroid to a nearby nuclear blast would be to squash inward on the side facing the blast, absorb the kick, and fly away as an intact unit on a slightly different trajectory.
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  • With our present technology there's little we could do to deflect a projectile of sizable momentum.
    You're being much too vague. Do you want to quantify what you mean by "deflect" and "sizable momentum"? Available technology includes explosive devices yielding upwards of 20 megatons (8.4e23 ergs), and the kick you can get out of that is going to be impressive regardless. The Earth is only 6,400,000 meters radius; if you can give something a kick of 1 m/sec 6.4e6 seconds ahead (about 2.5 months), it'll have moved far enough to turn a strike into a miss. If you can apply the kick further ahead, you need less delta-V and can move even bigger objects with the same device.
    We ought to spend the money on manned space exploration of the solar system. That way we get access to the asteroid belt's natural resources, which we need in order to construct the massive equipment we'd need to both monitor and protect against incursions from that same asteroid belt.
    Your premise, that massive equipment is required to gain protection from asteroid/comet strikes, is incorrect. Being able to loft a few high-yield thermonuclear bombs on spacecraft buses with high-impulse ion drives would probably do the trick. A few small (30 cm) orbital telescopes would multiply our asteroid- and comet-finding capabilities manifold. Manned space is desirable for a number of reasons, but asteroid defense doesn't require it.
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  • speaking of extraterrestrial objects, i'm living in Canada and was travelling across the 407 ETR near Goreway Dr in Brampton at about 8:45-9:30pm - when I noticed a green and red light dart across the sky. This was on Sunday night, November 28. I thought it was something local in the area, like a movie theatre, but wasn't aware of any flashing lights into the sky, cuz sometimes that happens. It was a real strange colour that I'd never seen flashed into the sky...

  • It scares the hell out of me.

    SDI failed because (one of many reasons) several of the technologies involved, particularly X ray lasers, relied on putting extremely large power sources into orbit, which basically means nukes, and there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.

    Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.

  • Here's a link [yahoo.com] to the Yahoo News story about asteroid characteristics, specifically referencing Mathilde.
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  • Arthur C. Clarke has been campaigning for something like this for a long time. In his books, there are several references to a "Spaceguard" which watches the night sky and alerts of any asteroids which look like they are on a collision course with Earth.

    This doesn't sound like they are quite going that far--this is just some committee to advise on when we do find one, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

    Some people might see this as a waste of money, but I disagree:

    • We know that asteroids have indeed hit the earth before.
    • We also know that they can cause a great deal of damage.
    • Statistically, it will have to someday happen again, as it has in the past.
    • By knowing it's coming in advance, we can prepare and do something about it. If we don't, then our chances drop dramatically.

    Keeping our heads in the sand claiming "it costs too much!" isn't very smart when a single strike can wipe us out with all our precious money in the process.

  • You know, this would be a *great* time for some math calculations. I'll pull some numbers and formulas out of my ass, and hopefully someone who actually knows what they are talking about can prove/disprove the idea that this is useful. I am just doing this to fuel discussion, and not because I actually know what I am talking about.

    So, Given:
    Earth is considered stationary relative to the asteroid.
    An cosmic object of mass 'm' and velocity 'v',
    assuming 'v' is constant, that gravitation acceleration by the earth and sun are neglible.

    We can actually find this point, where earth's gravity becomes non-neglible.

    First, Fg (force of gravity) equals:
    Fg = Kg * me * m / d^2

    where:
    Kg = the gravitation constant (too lazy to look it up)
    me = the mass of the earth (in kg)
    d = the distance between the centers of gravity (not the surfaces), in metres.

    Now assume that this is a two dimesional collison between the asteriod, and the earth (since the path of the asteroid can be considered a straight line, and a straight line can be defined by two points, and the point of earth is a third, and all that is needed to define 2 dimensions is three points)

    Now, we have to find 'd', such that the asteroid won't hit the earth.

    e
    d /
    /
    /i
    *----X---------------- -Path of asteriod
    earth's
    x-intercept

    Now, Fg = Kc*m*me/d^2, find the minimum distance "d" such that the path of the asteroid is changed enough to hit the earth (that is, to move the asteroid d*sin(i)) in the positive y-direction in the time it 'Ti' takes for the asteroid to travel d*cos(i).

    Ti = d*cos(i)/v

    So:
    Fg = ma = m*me*Kc/d^2

    where:

    a = acceleration of the asteroid by gravity

    Therefore:
    a = me*Kc/d^2

    a = vf - vo / Ti

    where :
    vf = final velocity as it hits earth or crosses earth's x-intercept

    v0 = the original velocity of the asteroid

    Ti = change of time from the original position, to earth's x-intercept

    Now v0 = 0, because the asteroid is not traveling in the y-direction to start with.
    a = vf/Ti

    vf/Ti = Kc*me/d^2

    vf = distance/time

    where:
    distance = d*sin(i)
    time = Ti

    d*sin(i)/Ti^2 = Kc*me/d^2

    sin(i)/Ti^2 = Kc*me/d^3

    Rearranging all of that to whatever you want, what we have is we need an asteroid with a certain time to impact, distance, and angle of incidence from earth to hit it. You will notice that mass of the asteroid is irrelevant at this point.

    Now, if 'd', 'i', or 'Ti' is small/large enough to deflect the asteroid toward earth, we are in trouble.

    Again, this assumes earth is stationary in respect to the asteroid. That is, that velocity of the earth is much, much smaller that the velocity of the asteroid.

    Now we have to figure out energy in needed to push the asteroid out of a collision path. If this message generates enough karma, I will post a hot sequel entitled "Some *more* math calcuations". If not, then the calculation is left as a exercise for the reader.
  • Well, other than Kg became Kc, and my diagram went screwy, it's good enough.
  • ...there are already treaties in place that forbid the exo-atmospheric use of nuclear weapons.
    The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction, not nukes as such. A device to propel an asteroid arguably doesn't qualify. Besides, you know in your heart of hearts that the signatory nations would take perhaps 5 minutes to vote to exempt a mission to deflect a dangerous asteroid.
    Using this meteor-smashing as an excuse to start orbiting a Death Star is just giving carte blanche to the US military-industrial complex to gear up for full blown SDI again. An international anti-meteor shield treaty would be exploited in seconds by the US.
    Would we, now? Nukes are rather indiscriminate things; in orbit, they could be used to wipe out many dozens of satellites in one fell swoop, or take down the electrical grid of a goodly chunk of a continent (friend or foe). There would be a lot of collateral damage from any use near Earth, and there are no military targets far from Earth. I have to ask you just how the US could exploit such a treaty? Your suspicion is more productively directed at your own government (you might want to replace your "Official Secrets Act" with a Freedom of Information Act just for starters).
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  • You misunderstand chaos. (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Monday November 29, 1999 @07:35AM (#1497818) Journal
    But monitoring the asteroids when they are in the asteroid belt will do no good whatsoever. They are all in chaotic orbits, so current observations don't allow us to predict their future paths.
    Yes we can. The property of chaotic behavior is that the long-term effect of infinitesimal perturbations grows rapidly over time. Note, long-term effect. Just because an orbit cannot be projected reliably for a million years doesn't support your conclusion. We can do a perfectly adequate job of seeing where these rocks will be over 20 years or so, and that's more than sufficient warning.
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  • Cool Idea - with all this running around promoting Spaceguard I could do with some time on his cluster....

    All we need is a few clones of Mark...

    And I could do with a clone to do the hard work while I surf slashdot.
  • You seem to be more concerned about the Earth deflecting an object into its own path, but I think the more likely problem is an asteroid (or comet) that is already on a collision course with us. In other words, the angle i in your calculations is very, very small.

    The whole point of this exercise is to find all the Earth-crossers we can, measure their orbits as accurately as possible and extrapolate them into the future to find out if they're going to go 'bonk'. If they are, I'm not sure what we'd do given present technology, but maybe in the future we could do something about it.
  • It's not the ones in the asteroid belt that we should be worrying about. It's the ones that cross our orbit, of which there are many known and probably many more unknown.
  • While UNIT has acted admirably on several occassions, they're hardly saints. Just look at the way that they massacred a bunch of Silurians when there was no need for it. Besides, the real threat is not asteroids crashing into the Earth, but time-traveling spaceships controlled by the inhabitants of the tenth planet.
  • No, it's okay - we have Ireland in the way ;))
  • You are probably right, I did want to do calculations about the force and/or energy need to knock an asteriod out of orbit (a la two-dimesional collisions of non-elastic bodies), but halfway through my calculation, I thought I should clarify where the asteroid would start being affected by planetary gravitation. Oh well, it was good to practice my old 1st year physics again.
  • The whole point of the Center is to decide what to do. Sounds good to me.
  • I could pick a few nits with your analysis (like your use of Kg instead of the standard symbol G for the gravitational constant, which BTW has a value around 6e-11 N/kg^2/m^2) but mostly I think you erred by over-simplifying into uselessness. Gravity is an inverse-square force so the point where the asteroid "starts being affected" is at infinity, and the exercise in the real world is a 3-body problem where the primary (Sol) is the overwhelming influence until a relatively brief time before any possible collision. What you really need to do is go over your orbital mechanics, keeping in mind Kepler's Law, and calculate what a given change in velocity will do to the position of the asteroid after X fraction of an orbit and the timing of its arrival. You'll do some algebra for the aphelion/perihelion calculations, and the rest you may have a better time looking up the answers (I know I did). Treat it as an interesting puzzle and you can't go wrong, succeed or fail.
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  • That's probably why Armagh is really interested in it..

  • The treaty bans weapons of mass destruction, not nukes as such.

    It's an offshoot of the atmospheric test ban treaty - anything with a prompt criticality is seen as a device and so is included.

    • Reactors & RTGs - OK (although concerns about lofting radionucliides still apply)
    • Bombs - Bad (even ones with "for research purposes only" on the side).
    • Explosion-pumped X-ray lasers, Orion propulsion - Bad.

    Your point about the OSA is mere anti-British sophistry. Anyway, that nice Mr Blair has promised us a FOIA soon and we all trust him completely. We also look forward to the day when the Labour Party's favoured candidate for Lord Mayor of London, Jeffrey Archer (BA, Oxon) is placed in a position to rule us all equally wisely.

  • What are you on about?

    Archer was a Tory candidate for Lord Mayor, not Labour. and he's out of the contest now because some dirty dealings from his past were revealed.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Good points, thank you for the ideas. Again, my calculations were just put up to hopefully generate discussion.
  • He was being sarcastic.

  • But due to weird and unusual gravitational interactions, asteroids from the belt can sometimes be "plucked out" into a near-earth-crossing orbit. After all, just consider all the masses involved - quite a complex system, no? We can't even solve the 3-body problem precisely, much less the 10^whatever-body problem!

  • In fact, a lot of research has already been done. See e.g.:

    Open Directory: Planetary_Defense/ [dmoz.org] and
    http://dspace.dial.pipex.co m/town/terrace/fr77/more.htm [pipex.com].

    This only underlines the conclusion that this Centre (British spelling please!) is urgently needed.

  • You are assuming that the world would get its act together in enough time to deflect the asteroid while it was still far away. Is it your experience that governments are willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the say-so of a few techies? Like, for example, Y2K? It seems much more likely that by the time the govts. were willing to acknowledge the problem the thing would be almost on top of us and quite obviously heading straight for us.

    So, I'm thinking, how far in advance do we have to apply the kick? Will the politicians get their act together in time?

    There are a few important figures missing from your example - the mass and velocity of the asteroid.

    We'll talk about mass later.

    Mean orbital velocity is about 20 km/sec for a typical asteroid out in the belt, but if one is nudged out of orbit it'll pick up velocity as it falls toward the sun from its old orbital radius of about 2AU "down" to the Earth's orbital radius at 1AU (1AU=1.5e11m).

    PE=-GMm/R gives delta E = -GMm.(1/R-1/r)

    and KE=mv**2/2 gives delta v = sqrt(2GM.(1/R-1/r))

    Mass of the sun is 1.9e30 kg and G=6.7e-11 whatsits so the asteroid has picked up a delta v of about 30km/sec by the time it crosses the Earth's path. Total velocity therefore reaches about 50km/sec by the time it's in our neighborhood but this may vary by an order of magnitude.

    OK so the energy of detonation might deliver energy of 1e17 Joules but how much of that can be imparted to the asteroid? Some will be wasted in heating the asteroid, some will be directed obliquely etc. Assume pessimistically 1e15 J (about 1% of the blast energy) is transferred to the asteroid as kinetic energy.

    Now with regard to the mass of the intruder: we're only interested in sizes that would justify a deflection attempt. On the other hand if it's too big there's nothing we can do. A typical asteroid, according to my handly old Chemical Rubber Company data book, masses about 1e17 kg. The biggest are about 1e20 kg. An asteroid (too small to have a name) might massing about 10 million tonnes would be a mere speck.

    To give an idea of relative scale, the Earth is about 6e24 kg.

    If the asteroid does mass only 10e10 kg then imparting 10e15 J as kinetic energy will give it a lateral velocity of sqrt(2E/m) ~ 500 m/s. That's a hefty kick!

    We just want it to miss the atmosphere. We don't have to worry about tidal effects since an asteroid of this size wouldn't exert a gravitational pull on the ocean anything like the moon's unless it passed by at an altitude of only a couple of hundred meters. So we have to deflect, as you said, only by the Earth's radius (6.4e6 m) by the time it crosses our orbit. At 500m/s this takes 12800 seconds. Only about three and a half hours! We're saved.

    But if the asteroid masses 10e17 kg, then our 10e15 J only gives a sideways acceleration of about 0.14 m/s. You'd have to detonate 530 days before the asteroid reached us. At that time, the asteroid still has to travel thousands of millions of kilometers before it reaches us. The situation is even worse when you consider that it would take months for the warhead to reach the asteroid. So we'd need to know three to five years in advance when the asteroid is in a much less threatening orbit.

    Even if Earth-based telescopes were good enough, and we had massive banks of computers tracking all the asteroids, would we even notice that far in advance, that there was a risk? If we did, how sure could we be reasonably sure that it was really going to hit us? Governments are unlikely to stump up the cash for an asteroid deflection mission if there isn't a clear and present danger.

    Maybe there are many asteroids each year that get into an orbit which could possibly hit us five years later. We could hardly afford to launch missions to hit them all. IMO we just don't have the resources yet to protect us against big "planet killer" asteroids like in the movies. We need to have a network of big weapons platforms out there between us and the belt, ready to shoot down rogue asteroids immediately they wander into a clearly dangerous orbit.

    Disclaimer: most of my calculations are very rough first-order approximations based on high-school physics. I am not an orbital mechanics expert. Nor, indeed, a rocket scientist ;o)

    BTW, so far at least, really high-impulse ion drives exist only in the realm of science fiction. NASA's current ion drives only provide a fraction of a meter per second squared. The main advantages are simplicity, cheapness and smaller lighter craft. They won't get us to the asteroid belt in two weeks, anyway.

    But a renewed interest in manned space flight would inevitably mean increased investment into propulsion research. The money needed for that isn't going to materialise out of this armageddon project, I seriously doubt enough people would take it seriously enough to put up with an increase in taxes.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • yeah baby

    gr33tz to d3v0

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