I recently finished reading Titan by Stephen Baxter, as usual an interesting book but also extremely depressing!
One aspect of the story did have me wondering though:
BEWARE SPOILERS!!!
A new ‘Cold War’ has started between the US and China, after a short conflict over Taiwan it becomes clear to the Chinese leadership that the US and the West has an unassailable technological advantage over them. They hatch a plan to use a recently discovered asteroid that is scheduled to pass close to Earth as a weapon, dropping it into the Atlantic and severely damaging the US and Europe. They achieve this by detonating several thermonuclear warheads close to the asteroid to nudge it onto the desired path using an apparently civilian manned (well, womaned) exploration mission as a cover.
However they’ve underestimated the size of the asteroid and although their plan works flawlessly it also leads to an extinction level impact and the destruction of humanity. :eek:
My question is, with current technology is such a mission feasible? With my admitadly limited knowledge it seemed plausible enough.
There have already been a number of unmanned asteroid rendezvous missions, including one to a (relatively) near-earth asteroid. See NEAR Shoemaker, Hayabusa, and Dawn. However, these missions all visited easy to reach asteroids, and took years to arrive. My WAG is that it would be tremendously more difficult to rendezvous with an asteroid that’s anywhere near colliding with earth – perhaps requiring an order of magnitude more delta-V than previous missions. However I’ll leave that math to our resident rocket experts…
If you could rendezvous with a potential earth-killer, you’d have to impart a nontrivial delta-V to get it to hit earth. A nuke would be a very inefficient method, since most of its energy would be wasted as radiation. It would probably be better to strap on some sort of thruster, but again I leave it to the rocket experts to tell us if that’s feasible.
(I hate when that happens.)
If they were not able to accurately determine the mass of the asteroid, how could they possibly have hoped to fine-tune things so as to cause the Earth impact to happen at a precise point?
Even without this troublesome omission, this plot assumes they have a highly refined capability to analyze the precise effect of detonating a nuclear bomb, and the ability to tune its energy yield to exactly what’s needed.
Yeah, I bet the Chinese ambassador didn’t get invited to many events after that little faux pas.
That’s a good point, the plot had a Chinese taikonaut (see what I did there?) taking measurements as her craft approached the asteroid so as to fine-tune the timing and distance of the detonations so as to achieve the desired effect. Maybe she wasn’t informed of the initial size estimates and just went with what was presented to her?