http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/news/stardust20110214.html
A few years ago we bombarded this comet. With kinetic weapons. Not nukes from orbit. Even though that's the only way to be sure.

Today we are getting some BDA (Bomb Damage Assessment) from the earlier strike.

I think I remember something about this. I'm not sure what they expect to find. I guess it might give us some more insight into the composition of comets but I really don't see how that information could be useful at this time. Unless they find something totally unexpected like large quantities of rare metals like gold and uranium.

Though I personally would rather they spent the money for this craft on more important things, I wont deny that having actual photographic evidence that humanity once made a crater on a comet will be pretty damn cool.

Hooray for another waste of tax payer dollars! I wish NASA would do something productive with the money they are given...

Ahh... Didn't find those nvde mighty morphin space vampires.

...If only they had a friendly competitor to give them a bit of motivation.
and/maybe if all of the money and time was spent on technology instead of on military.

The strength of comets and their ability to resist shattering will greatly help our ability to predict their orbit better as well as figure out the viability of various plans on how to deal with one on a collision course (not talking about the silly ones that hollywood created of us drilling in and blowing it up, but the real ones where we, say, try to gravitationally pull it ever so slightly into a different orbit. composition tells us the mass, impact cloud tells us how well it is held together as well as the ratio of water to rock (reflect differently). It's all extremely useful information on dealing with them if one were on a collision course assuming it was detected soon enough that we could implement a plan, and as mentioned the information also would help us predict their movements better as we would know better how melting ice and gravitational forces will alter their orbit giving a better forecast of where they will be years down the line.

This is what I was going to say, only better :nod:.

All the more useful if you ever hope to colonise other worlds and planetoids, particularly ones with little/no atmosphere. See those craters on the moon? They weren't made in the name of feng shui.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

:vaultboy:














:sadvaultboy:




Anyway, I think this is more important than people on these forums seem to generally give it credit to be...

NASA Employee: Hey guys a comet! We should totally blow it up!

NASA Employee2: Totally!

Anyone else think Rocket scientists are just eggheaded pyromaniacs?
Why were they bombing a comet(I guess thats what their doing) in the first place? Nvm.

Still, I would worry about our planet first than outer space. Got to set priorties.

What NASA funding?

Edit
I swear to god if some Megacorp CEO perfects a warp drive, I'm ditching this [censored] hole of a planet. Then commence the corporate vs government space war. Muahahah! Considering they would have the spaceships, guess who wins?

Edit
NASA's current budget is... in shambles. It's like giving someone 10 dollars and telling him to go build their own flying car.

If a large enough NEO were to hit us it'd wreak far more destruction on the environment than we've ever done. Some can even wipe out all life

Tracking and anolyzing NEOs is one of the most important things we can do to protect our planet

Yeah, how would that accomplish anything, if its a huge asteroid will we pull something off to devert its course or blow it up? Seems almost impossible?

And with all that knowledge and if impossible to stop it, all we can do is watch and fold out a lawn chair and make a toast to oblivion.

The point of the exercise is to find better ways to:
A: be able to see these things coming -- the percentage we're able to keep track of is disturbingly low (as I recall).
B: deal with them if they try to deal with us.

Saying, "We don't know what we could do, so we should just give up and wait for impact" is a pretty silly way to look at things when we've (hopefully) got plenty of time to figure out some options.

It's not impossible, there are various plans on how to divert an NEO. The one that I recall NASA favoring is building a space tractor that uses it's gravity to slowly tug the NEO on a non-collision course. It would need years warning, though, to work, which is EXACTLY what these tests are for: to give us info to get that advanced warning.

Also: NASA is not Hollywood, they know blowing it up is not a real solution. All you do is make a slug into buckshot (in order to it to be effective you'd have to make the vast majority of the NEO into fragments too small to survive entering our atmosphere, but even then you run the risk of creating a huge space flight hazard as well as putting countless satellites at risk of severe damage from the micrometeorites)

Is it possible that you could use the force from a nuclear missile to divert an asteroids trajectory? Why does it have to be blown up?

Definitely. It's one of the plans that NASA has, and one of only two considered viable (gravity tractor being the other). The problem, though, is it's something that has to be timed out very well and you need to know about the strength of the target --- which, once again, this test gave us information about --- otherwise you run the risk of fracturing it. Even if you succeed in diverting it, don't break it, but do fracture it, the tidal forces when it comes close to the Earth, or possible the moon depending on it's trajectory, could cause the fracture to break and then the orbit would change. If we were to change an orbit of an NEO, we'd want to change it in a way that is very predictable for a long time.

Still, given the alternative, in the event it is too late for a gravity tractor, it'd most definitely be used, but we'd still need months of warning to make it effective (the closer an NEO is, the harder to change the orbit. A small 1^o change far enough out out would cause the object to easily miss us.)