Paintballs may help deflect an incoming asteroid (w/ Video)

In the event that a giant asteroid is headed toward Earth, you'd better hope that it's blindingly white. A pale asteroid would reflect sunlight—and over time, this bouncing of photons off its surface could create enough of a force to push the asteroid off its course. How might one encourage such a deflection? The answer, according to an MIT graduate student: with a volley or two of space-launched paintballs. Sung Wook Paek, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says if timed just right, pellets full of paint powder, launched in two rounds from a spacecraft at relatively close distance, would cover the front and back of an asteroid, more than doubling its reflectivity, or albedo. The initial force from the pellets would bump an asteroid off course; over time, the sun's photons would deflect the asteroid even more.

Read more at: phys.org...

Sign me up for space paint ball. Dream Job.
Imagine the pressure. Just you and your paintball gun standing in the way of the destruction of mankind. Epic.

Well, good luck painting an asteroid the size of Texas.

Sure. Why not? If there is enough time (lots of it). And the asteroid is hollow (large area, low mass). Hopefully the rock isn't tumbling, that would complicate things.

Originally posted by Phage
Sure. Why not? If there is enough time (lots of it). And the asteroid is hollow (large area, low mass). Hopefully the rock isn't tumbling, that would complicate things.

edit on 10/26/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

I don't think necessarily it would. You would only need minor adjustments to the trajectory. Perfectly plausible if its tumbling end over end. Unless its completely symmetrical lol

reply to post by ubeenhad

Turns out he's got it covered. Pun intended.

He used the asteroid’s period of rotation to determine the timing of pellets, launching a first round to cover the front of the asteroid, and firing a second round once the asteroid’s backside is exposed.

From his calculations, Paek estimates that it would take up to 20 years for the cumulative effect of solar radiation pressure to successfully pull the asteroid off its Earthbound trajectory.

web.mit.edu...

reply to post by Phage


20 years?
Sounds like we need a contingency plan.

Originally posted by Phage
Sure. Why not? If there is enough time (lots of it). And the asteroid is hollow (large area, low mass). Hopefully the rock isn't tumbling, that would complicate things.

edit on 10/26/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

Ho i'm I reading right Phage may have been wrong you said no way before
www.abovetopsecret.com...
at botton of page.
remember Asteroid are made off durty snow (white)

Originally posted by Trillium

Originally posted by Phage
Sure. Why not? If there is enough time (lots of it). And the asteroid is hollow (large area, low mass). Hopefully the rock isn't tumbling, that would complicate things.

edit on 10/26/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

Ho i'm I reading right Phage may have been wrong you said no way before
www.abovetopsecret.com...
at botton of page.
remember Asteroid are made off durty snow (white)

No phage wasn't wrong.
Im pretty sure he was referring to the actual painting being problematic if the object was tumbling. It is, and the cited MIT work solved it. At first glance I thought he was referring to the reflection.

Originally posted by ubeenhad

Originally posted by Trillium

Originally posted by Phage
Sure. Why not? If there is enough time (lots of it). And the asteroid is hollow (large area, low mass). Hopefully the rock isn't tumbling, that would complicate things.

edit on 10/26/2012 by Phage because: (no reason given)

Ho i'm I reading right Phage may have been wrong you said no way before
www.abovetopsecret.com...
at botton of page.
remember Asteroid are made off durty snow (white)

No phage wasn't wrong.
Im pretty sure he was referring to the actual painting being problematic if the object was tumbling. It is, and the cited MIT work solved it. At first glance I thought he was referring to the reflection.

edit on 26-10-2012 by ubeenhad because: (no reason given)

I quess you did not go read the page I quoted.
we were talking about solar wind and CME affecting the trajectery of a asteroid Fail

reply to post by Trillium


I read a few posts and didn't get the correlation so I figured it was an inside joke.

reply to post by Trillium

Ho i'm I reading right Phage may have been wrong you said no way before

A CME is very brief. This is talking about the prolonged effect of radiation pressure. Not a CME.

Asteroid are made off durty snow

Comets are "dirty snow". Actually more like ice covered with dirt.
Asteroids are rocky.

Originally posted by ubeenhad
reply to post by Phage

 

20 years?
Sounds like we need a contingency plan.

anti-gravity would be a better solution

you could literally fly a team up there, attach devices to said asteroid and if it had metal park it in orbit or land it gently for mining.

and it probably already exists, we just need to round up a few psychopathic folks keeping it hidden and flush them down history's toilet.

Comets are "dirty snow". Actually more like ice covered with dirt.
Asteroids are rocky.

lol beat me to it

reply to post by DerepentLEstranger


We could just use magic.

IF we had twenty years to react, then a single nuclear detonation in close proximity would do the job easily without having to send out painters. For heavens sake, think of how many pellets you would need.

"Sir, we are out of pellets."

"Very well, send in the four hundred and twenty first wave. At this rate I'll miss my little girl's twenty first birthday party. Did I mention she turned seven last week."


ROFL. How much did this research cost us!

P

Originally posted by ubeenhad
reply to post by DerepentLEstranger

 

We could just use magic.

sure we could, know any good psycho-kinetics up to the job?

but anti-gravity would be easier

only a sorceror's aprentice would think to use magic to sweep a room

From the standpoint of the popular rational materialism which dominates the nihilist phase., it
may appear absurd that the philosophy of magic will arise first to complement and then surpass
that of science and materialism However the most advanced scientific theories are already beginning to exhibit magical features in their new descriptions of reality. Both in particle physics and cosmogenesis a fundamental acausality, indeterminacy, and observer dependence is now ascribed to reality. These are, property speaking, magical theories, not material ones. It also appears that in biology. psychology and medicine, theories of strict causality must give ground to some form of emergent vitalism for organisms which are evidently more than the sum of their parts. This co-emergent vital principle or morphic field is equivalent to the intrinsic power or mana of magical theory.
The prevailing orthodoxy of the coming Chaoist age will represent something of a truce between magic and science; although the magical aspects may take on heavy scientific camouflage at first to make them more acceptable. Transcendental theories will virtually disappear and magical phenomena will no longer be acknowledged as proof of anything spiritual. The word “God “ will be both objectively and subjectively meaningless except to a few cliques and cranks; although towards the end of the Pandemonaeon new forms of magical transcendentalism will arise, but it would be premature to speculate on their precise manifestation. The model does not predict the nature of the characteristic post-industrial technology of the impending aeon. The decline of materialistic theories throughout the aeon does not in itself imply the loss of advanced technology.As technology becomes progressively more complex and less comprehensible there is a tendency to conceive of it and use it as though it were a magical phenomenon. Devices incorporating quantum mechanical or direct psi-interactive components may well make any distinction between magical and material systems meaningless in any case. So the impending Pandemonaeon may be characterized by an extremely complex yet rationally incomprehensible high technology. Alternatively the model will equally well accommodate a post-catastrophe technology sufficient to support a new hunter-gatherer tribalized society
resembling the first shamanic aeon when the relative strengths of the paradigms were similar. At the time of writing it is too early to speculate on the character of the second phase of the Pandemonaeon, which has been left nameless. It remains to be seen whether humanity will spend this phase out amongst the stars or squabbling over tinned food in the smoking ruins. Yet any credible form of stellar travel will have to be based on principles more akin to those currently under investigation in magic than in science. Some form of machine-enhanced teleportation might suffice, reaction-thrust vehicles plainly will not.
***
Dangerous times lie ahead. Millennial apocalyptic beliefs present in monotheism may still yet
trigger disaster during the death spasms of transcendentalism. A fierce rearguard action may be expected from materialist philosophies as they slide further into a nihilism whose adherents will, for a while, demand ever more of what is not working . ever more luxury and sensationalism in an ecology unable to support it.
The birth of the Pandemonaeon as a generally accepted paradigm could be a long and bloody business. If things go badly it could be preceded by a catastrophe which precipitates us into a new stone age rather than an interstellar age. Although there will be important niches for magicians in either situation, I would prefer my descendants to perform their sorceries among the stars rather than huddled in the ruins.

excerpted from Peter Carroll's Liber Kaos chapter 2 Aeonics [The Psychohistorical Model of History]

I doubt if that would work. These asteroids are usually locked into an orbit. I'm not sure it is going to be that easy to shift these things. If it was, then a volcanic eruption could move the earth out of orbit by putting dust particles on one side of the planet. I have not see any evidence of that happening yet.

ah..

so thats how we stopped the asteroid known as "the moon" from smashing into earth

Originally posted by ubeenhad
reply to post by DerepentLEstranger

 

We could just use magic.

This may take more than magic. Perhaps when the incoming asteroid is on the way, it would be time to call on...

...Romney's MAGIC UNDERWEAR.

I wonder... Light is made of photons. If it is the weight of light, if you will allow, that might put an asteroid off course, then perhaps alongside this paintball idea, perhaps it would also be an idea to develop a method of focusing the suns rays precisely on the target object. Or more precisely, focus the rays on a particular location on the target object, in such a way as to produce a desired, and carefully defined course change.