zlacker

>>Brajes+(OP)
Really burying the important takeaway at the bottom:

Starting in 2025, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile — funded by the National Science Foundation — will catalog the solar system from the ground...

"It took us 200 years to discover all the asteroids we know to date, about 1.2 million asteroids," Mario Jurić, the Rubin Observatory's solar system discovery team lead and the director of the University of Washington's DiRAC Institute, told Astronomy. "In the first three to six months of Rubin, we will double that."

That's one additional ground based observatory coming online in the Southern hemisphere. If we get our act together and build a lot more of these and other space based observatories we're going to see the true scope of the "shooting gallery". We really need to raise public awareness of this, as a planet based civilization we are taking our chances by ignoring the problem and assuming everything will be fine for a hundred or a thousand more years. All of our efforts at averting a climate catastrophe will be for naught if we get smoked by a rock big enough to fill the atmosphere with particulate matter and drop global temperatures for years afterward let alone anything bigger resulting in global firestorms and tsunamis.

>>throwa+KW
Doesn’t even need to be a planet killer, even a small object like the Tunguska event hitting a large city (Like NYC) would cost trillions in damage and millions of lives, the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off. The cost to build some surveillance and technology to mitigate it would be far less.

And prevention wouldn’t require Bruce Willis to blow it up with nukes, like the DART mission all you’d need is to hit the space rock with a fast moving, small probe and alter its course by a millionth of a degree far enough out, could be the difference between hitting a city, landing in the ocean, or not hitting earth at all.

>>oceanp+u11
I read somewhere about the idea of sending white paint to coat one side this would cause one side to get hotter and cause the asteroid to spin sending it off course.

I'm quite sure it wouldn't work but was an interesting idea.

>>vortic+mb1
The problem is that they rotate. Maybe an electronically controlled jet that triggers only when aligned in the right direction.

>>readyp+Je1
Presumably it would be more efficient to use jet to stabilise it, so that the painted deflector can take effect

>>trucul+yG1
If you can detect it early enough an absolutely miniscule amount of force can multiply over time to an enormous difference in position later on. Much less force than would be required to stop it from spinning or sending material to act as a deflector.

>>zamada+1N1
You would want to design and test a vectoring nuclear thermal rocket built to absorb neutrons and reduce thrust on one side, and burn 100% on the other side, with the ability to gimbal the thrust vector depending on the asteroid's orientation. This gives you a much bigger margin of error versus "white paint" or conventional rockets imo.

You probably wouldn't want to nuke it, because you risk buck shotting the earth with a cloud of asteroids. Having a vectored nuclear rocket also allows you to change your trajectory if your initial calculations are off.