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2004-12-31 Home Front: Tech
Spacecraft setting off to shoot comet with 370kg bullet
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Posted by tipper 2004-12-31 2:15:46 AM|| || Front Page|| [11136 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 Deep Impact is a carefully planned act of celestial vandalism designed to deliver an answer.

I have this feeling that some group is going to eventually complain about this.
Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2004-12-31 2:34:57 AM||   2004-12-31 2:34:57 AM|| Front Page Top

#2  It is not likely to suffer any permanent damage in the collision, or to be knocked into a more dangerous orbit.

Famous last words. This has the looks of a Zionist trick to ravage rare resources belonging to all of the solar system instead of the selfish few.

There.... let's see what we get.
Posted by Shipman 2004-12-31 7:55:38 AM||   2004-12-31 7:55:38 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 Website for the Deep Impact project is here. Pretty interesting.
Posted by Dave D. 2004-12-31 8:09:14 AM||   2004-12-31 8:09:14 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 Twenty bucks says Halliburton's behind it all...
Posted by nada 2004-12-31 8:53:26 AM||   2004-12-31 8:53:26 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 More likely, Lockheed Martin or Northrup Grumman LOL.

Practice for destroying threatening meteors, maybe ... not to mention that we know far less than we'd like about the composition and origin of comets.
Posted by rkb 2004-12-31 12:08:36 PM||   2004-12-31 12:08:36 PM|| Front Page Top

#6 Ooops, add Rockwell to that list, for the control systems, maybe ....
Posted by rkb 2004-12-31 12:10:10 PM||   2004-12-31 12:10:10 PM|| Front Page Top

#7 "Yer not from around here, are ya boy? Travis, shewt that thing!"
Posted by BH 2004-12-31 12:23:42 PM||   2004-12-31 12:23:42 PM|| Front Page Top

#8 Article: Deep Impact is a carefully planned act of celestial vandalism designed to deliver an answer.

Shooting something at a hunk of rock hurtling through space is vandalism? Sounds like these people have graduated from worshipping living things (fauna and flora) to worshipping rocks.
Posted by Zhang Fei  2004-12-31 12:34:41 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com]  2004-12-31 12:34:41 PM|| Front Page Top

#9 ZF, it's the fact that they're bringing cans of spray paint that makes it vandalism...
Posted by Seafarious  2004-12-31 1:16:40 PM||   2004-12-31 1:16:40 PM|| Front Page Top

#10 36" diameter copper bullet? Haven't seen those at Hiram's Guns and Spirits
Posted by Frank G  2004-12-31 1:49:42 PM||   2004-12-31 1:49:42 PM|| Front Page Top

#11 ZF- Who else worships a rock, hmmm?
Posted by Spot  2004-12-31 2:35:50 PM||   2004-12-31 2:35:50 PM|| Front Page Top

#12 Kewl! Its worth living through the WoT to get to see something like this. Asimov and Heinlein must be rolling in their graves because they died a few years too soon.
Posted by trailing wife 2004-12-31 3:02:04 PM||   2004-12-31 3:02:04 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 The next time that thing comes around, will it still have a hole in it?
Posted by John Q. Citizen 2004-12-31 3:09:26 PM||   2004-12-31 3:09:26 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 Article: In one sense, they were right: a direct collision between a comet the size of Tempel 1 and the Earth could effectively wipe out human civilisation.

I wonder if this theory is the offspring of Carl Sagan's unsupported theories about nuclear winter. You gotta love how pseudo-science results in crap conclusions piled up upon crap premises, so that the whole thing resembles a freshly-laid glob of elephant poop.
Posted by Zhang Fei  2004-12-31 3:10:58 PM|| [http://timurileng.blogspot.com]  2004-12-31 3:10:58 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 dang - with that hole in it what if we have to put up with an orbit-long 200db whistle effect?
Posted by Frank G  2004-12-31 3:15:17 PM||   2004-12-31 3:15:17 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 nobody has any idea of the mass, or density, of a comet - whether they are like frozen concrete, or have the texture of frosted candyfloss.
+
"This is the astronomical equivalent of a 767 airliner running into a mosquito,"

These two statements don't add up
Posted by Unegum Whaimp3886 2004-12-31 5:41:32 PM||   2004-12-31 5:41:32 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 Frank - In space, no one can hear you scream, you know. The whistling would drown it out, heh.
Posted by .com 2004-12-31 5:53:11 PM||   2004-12-31 5:53:11 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 LOL - I know, just the possible unintended consequences, as usual, get me going
Posted by Frank G  2004-12-31 6:10:05 PM||   2004-12-31 6:10:05 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 About Sagan's Nuclear Winter Theories. I suspect he was off slightly on his golbal temperature effects but remember one volcano was enough to couse the "Year Without Summer", 1819 IIRC. The Amount of crap that would be pumped into the atmosphere from the fires associated with a nuclear war should have some effect. IIRC the Kuwaiti oil fires did have regional effects. The effects of an asteriod or comet are hard to quantify but for a given mass at a given speed hthe amount of energy released in the impact can be precisely calculated. Add in the effects from fires and any possible volcanic events that such an impact might trigger is completely incalcuable. Curiously two events that happened around the time of the demise of the Dinosaurs, the impact in the Yucatan and the volcanic event that fromed the Deccan Traps in India. These two areas of the world just happened to be on opposite sides of the globe when the impact happened. Some Geologists think that the two may be related
Posted by Cheaderhead 2004-12-31 6:57:57 PM||   2004-12-31 6:57:57 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 UN Security Council has passed a resolution to negotiate with the comet before it will authorize the use of force.
Posted by Capt America  2004-12-31 7:20:45 PM||   2004-12-31 7:20:45 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 think of all the minerals lost to this "cowboy" experiment (guns and all)! A resource belonging to teh developing nations of Gaia. We'll be asked to put an equivalent chunk of change in a UN-escrow account
Posted by Frank G  2004-12-31 7:24:31 PM||   2004-12-31 7:24:31 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 Deep Impact is a carefully planned act of celestial vandalism designed to deliver an answer.

The message here is to never insert a joke into a scientific article.
Posted by WingedAvenger 2004-12-31 7:31:47 PM||   2004-12-31 7:31:47 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 ...Actually, it seems to me that if we can put a 'bullet' into a comet, we can do the same thing to a warhead or a satellite.

Mike
Posted by Mike Kozlowski 2004-12-31 8:09:02 PM||   2004-12-31 8:09:02 PM|| Front Page Top

#24 "Tempel 1....is not likely to suffer any permanent damage in the collision, or to be knocked into a more dangerous orbit."

Famous last words?

And what about the potential invasion of earth by infuriated little green men with bulging eyes from Tempel 1?
Posted by Bryan 2004-12-31 9:21:28 PM||   2004-12-31 9:21:28 PM|| Front Page Top

#25 Mike K - that sounds dangerously like a missile defense system, which as we know from Reagan's "Star Wars" dreams, won't work....oh (oops! /MSM).
Posted by Frank G  2004-12-31 9:24:13 PM||   2004-12-31 9:24:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#26 I'm not sure there's a whole lot of commonality between these rendezvous with planetary objects and trying to intercept an incoming missile.

A comet is very big, it's not radar-stealthy, it's travelling on a well-known trajectory, it's not performing any evasive maneuvers, and it can be approached in a leisurely fashion from an optimal direction. Hitting an incoming missile would be a whole different ballgame, I would think.
Posted by Dave D. 2004-12-31 9:37:56 PM||   2004-12-31 9:37:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#27 If it starts to evade run like hell for the nearest cave.
Posted by Sock Puppet of Doom 2004-12-31 9:51:01 PM|| [http://www.slhess.com]  2004-12-31 9:51:01 PM|| Front Page Top

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