Biggest Man-Made Lightshow Ever

Hi ATS.

Last week i was doing some thinking.
I was thinking about how we would deal with an asteroid directly heading for earth..

Would we nuke it?
From there i got to: how would it look like if a nuke exploded in space.
After pondering about that for a while i layed it to rest.

So today i visited one of my regular sites called; BlackListedNews.com
It just happens to contain an article about the EXACT thing i was thinking about. (happens to my quite often, anyone else had some similar experiences ?)

The article is about 'Operation Starfish Prime'.

Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States of America on July 9, 1962, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency (which became the Defense Nuclear Agency in 1971). Launched via a Thor rocket and carrying a W49 thermonuclear warhead (manufactured by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) and a Mk. 4 reentry vehicle, the explosion took place 250 miles (400 km) above a point 19 miles (31 km) southwest of Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean. It was one of five tests conducted by the USA in outer space as defined by the FAI. It produced a yield equivalent to 1.4 megatons of TNT.

I wasn't familiar with this experiment.
I've searched and found a couple of references but not whole lot on this.

So i decided to share.

Possibly the biggest manmade lightshow ever and not one we should recreate imho!
It knocked out several sattelites and made that area of space unsuitable for sattelites to travel through.
It was a THOUSAND times more powerful then the one dropped on Hiroshima.

First some pics of the event:





Vid of the event:



interesting article and awesome VID

source

Scary yet beautiful at the same time.

Here's an article about blasting a asteroid off path with nukes.....
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I was thinking about comet elenin today. How it was destroyed by a solar blast. Then I started to remember all of the soho footage of what look to be craft witch are larger or as large as earth.

Did all the fallout escape Earth completely, or was a goodly amount trapped, (temporarily?) by the magnetosphere, with the chance of being blasted back to Earth by Solar flares...like presently.

A bigger light show would have been the atmospheric nuke that was detonated above Hawaii, which knocked out power to the entire island chain.

Originally posted by babybunnies
A bigger light show would have been the atmospheric nuke that was detonated above Hawaii, which knocked out power to the entire island chain.

That's the same one as from the OP.

It would honestly be easier to just put a volley of magnetically accelerated slugs (large DU rounds iron/nickel/neodymium alloy core and jacket) on the target than to build and launch a large enough nuke to appreciably alter the course of an asteroid (remember, Tsar Bomba, the biggest ever detonated, was only 50MT, and you'd need around 5 to 600 MT).

Originally posted by smurfy
Did all the fallout escape Earth completely, or was a goodly amount trapped, (temporarily?) by the magnetosphere, with the chance of being blasted back to Earth by Solar flares...like presently.

Given the altitude at which the device initiated, there wouldn't be much fallout. Most fallout consists of soil particles and pulverized bits of the target. That far up, the only source for fallout would be the device itself. While some of that might eventually find its way back down to the surface, it probably wouldn't be noticed...natural background radiation would mask it.

Originally posted by Arudem
It would honestly be easier to just put a volley of magnetically accelerated slugs (large DU rounds iron/nickel/neodymium alloy core and jacket) on the target than to build and launch a large enough nuke to appreciably alter the course of an asteroid (remember, Tsar Bomba, the biggest ever detonated, was only 50MT, and you'd need around 5 to 600 MT).

Why don't we just wait for the Enterprise to snag it with a tractor beam?

Sorry for the snark...after a 16 hour day at work (don't ask), I'm a bit tired. In all seriousness, though, how is it "easier" to develop a rail gun / coil gun / magnetic accelerator capable of accelerating a payload not only to orbital velocity (already somewhat beyond practical engineering limits), but to escape velocity (since, presumably, we want to break up this hypothetical asteroid before it gets that close)?

Assuming that the launching system could be built, why bother with depleted uranium rounds? You don't need good armor penetration in this case, you need kinetic energy on target. Given the velocity your hypothetical payload will have, and the fact that kinetic energy increases as the square of the velocity, but only linearly with respect to mass, anything that can survive the atmospheric transit will be fine as ammo....you could put steel 'driving bands' around chunks of rock, or politicians.

Finally, assuming that you have the launcher and the ammo available, I'm really not convinced that you could deliver more kinetic energy to an asteroid with rail-gun-launched solid shot than with nuclear warheads.

Long story short, while the nuclear approach might not be subtle, cool, or elegant, it does have some advantage. It uses existing technology, and it delivers more energy to the target.

reply to post by Brother Stormhammer


Coilguns are "existing tech", I've built two that can be held in the HAND. The only restriction on power comes from the number of capacitors and EMASCs you can afford. AP rounds because it will break up the object, making it that much less likely that its bulk will impact Earth.

Snark is fine.

We would not wait till the last minite to blast a asteriod so you would not get the light show they had with Operation Starfish Prime.

A asteriod that was going to hit earth would be blasted weeks to months before its impact date and 100,000s to millions of miles from earth

Hitting a asteriod within 500 miles of impact would only turn the asteriod from a bullet to a shotgun blast impact

Originally posted by Arudem
reply to post by Brother Stormhammer

 

Coilguns are "existing tech", I've built two that can be held in the HAND. The only restriction on power comes from the number of capacitors and EMASCs you can afford. AP rounds because it will break up the object, making it that much less likely that its bulk will impact Earth.

Snark is fine.

I know coil guns can be built...building one that could do the job you're asking one to do, on the other hand, is 'way beyond current tech.

As for breaking up the asteroid, you don't need AP rounds for that...as noted, you need pure kinetic energy. Making the ammo out of something (or somethings) exotic (and in some cases toxic) just drives up the program cost, and slows down ammo production. I don't believe in giving St. Murphy any more chances than necessary to work his 'magic' on