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TheGoblinPopper t1_itmgfc5 wrote

Asteroids@home is like SETI but for mapping the entire asteroid belt and known bodies.

You can use BOINC to dedicate processing power to it on your laptops or phones if you wanted to.

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carlitos_moreno t1_itovfkr wrote

I've been wondering if I use a computer that's too old (and too slow), would it slow then down rather than help?

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Latexi95 t1_itoxc3b wrote

No. These kind of works take months to calculate in total and are split into millions of smaller tasks that are then distributed to all devices. Your computer will just calculate as many small parts as it can. It gets new assignment when it has completed one small part of the calculation.

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dan_dares t1_itpavlr wrote

and each chunk is checked a few times, so it all helps!

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TheGoblinPopper t1_itoz1c5 wrote

To add on to what u/latexi95 said, the work units you get are hours of processing and you are usually given around 4-7 days to complete it. Once completed and on wifi, your PC will send the completed units back to the project automatically.

Astroids@home was something I used to crunch on my old android phone in 2015 or so, that hopefully can give you an idea of how simple the work units can be.

BOINC is actually pretty smart, and it will check your hardware before it sends anything, so if there are GPU focused work units vs CPU focused one it will check before they are sent.

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iqisoverrated t1_itpas66 wrote

It helps. The way this works is that you download a small packet to work on and then it sends the results back and gets the next packet (also there is redundancy in case someone doesn't send a packet back for a long time for whatever reason it gets distributed to someone else)

There's no need for reacting to asteroids "on a second's notice" (that's the whole point of doing this, really), so whether you work on each packet for an hour or a day makes no difference. With a slower computer you'll just go through less packets per day.

Consider that once a dangerous asteroid is detected it will take months/years to get a deflection mission launched - so a day or a week of 'delay' on the processing side isn't going to affect anything.

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really_random_user t1_itpcc08 wrote

Wouldn't slow them down, but might not be worthwhile, a phone based option may be better

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MankindsError t1_itm2g94 wrote

Say someone spots a planet killer, how much time would we need to put up a fight? Now that we know its entirely possible to deflect. Obviously the bigger the object the bigger we would need the craft to be for deflection, right?

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KitchenDepartment t1_itmczjs wrote

Designing interplanetary probes takes years. You could probably speed that up in an emergency. But there are no manufacturer out there that are prepared to build probes rapidly.

Then you need to travel to the asteroid, and you want to hit it years in advance of the impact. Adding all that up you probably need something like 5-10 years of early warning. Depending on how devastating the impact would be.

If you want to be serous about planetary defense you should have one of these probes ready in advance in case we ever need it. A new falcon 9 rocket is launched every week. There would be no problem swapping out a payload in the event of a emergency. You could launch the probe in a matter of weeks instead of years.

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bjornbamse t1_itn714n wrote

Designing interplanetary probes takes years because if can take years and you put time and effort into designing experiments. If there is time pressure it can be done faster.

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Verbose_Code t1_itn9w10 wrote

Yeah I’d imagine if there was an extinction sized asteroid people (and money) would be mobilized very rapidly.

We also would not be aiming to do anything fancy. New solar panels that we want to raise the TRL on? Nope, we’re using a 2 decade old design. New engine with potentially 5% efficiency gain? Nope, just build a bigger spacecraft.

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Hypamania t1_itpj62g wrote

But if we simply let it land we can mine all of the resources!

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RandoCommentGuy t1_itnlpin wrote

Exactly, just look at climate change, people with money are flocking to fix the problem..../s

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Verbose_Code t1_itnmrl7 wrote

Climate change is a much slower and easier to ignore problem. Big difference between “in 100 years we will see sea levels rise by x amount” and “this asteroid will impact the earth in 714 days and will kill everyone”

There are also a lot of people making money on us not fixing climate change. There isn’t the same economic force preventing us from reacting to asteroid threats

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JUYED-AWK-YACC t1_ito0wqx wrote

From an engineer’s standpoint, a mission with no science instruments would be awesome. You could really get stuff done!

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KitchenDepartment t1_itr1i93 wrote

Yes. And because it takes years to figure out the science part. The industry that produces the rest of the spacecraft is set up to also work on year long timelines. Producing the thrusters for a satellite in a few weeks would just be a waste of resources. You would spend most of the year without a job.

It is possible to do things faster. If things are truly desperate I am sure the US military's would just snatch up every satellite engineer they can get ahold of and give them blanket checks to whatever they need to manufacture a probe as soon as possible. But probes require a lot of highly specific components. And if only one of them is missing the entire program grinds to a halt.

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kcahmadi t1_itnjvlz wrote

with companies like spaceX and rocketlab pumping out launches more than once a month now. they probably have inventory on hand where enough money and government priority will let them dedicate a rocket to it immediately

all you would need now would be trajectory analysis and a payload which could very well just be a warhead or even just have the rocket itself collide

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Alan_Smithee_ t1_itndvkc wrote

That’s assuming an impacter/kinetic probe is the only type; there’s also the Gravity Tractor, which offers more precision, but probably needs more lead time (the closer the asteroid is to earth, the more you have to deflect it.)

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burtzev OP t1_itm4x18 wrote

I'd agree that size is a great factor. There's , however, another thing about this that lurks in the background. Simply 'moving' an object isn't the same thing as moving the object to a precise and planned place. The mission did change the orbit of a smaller asteroid around a larger one. I suspect such a system was chosen precisely because the degree and even direction of movement was unknown and unpredictable. Nobody would want to 'accidentally succeed' by pushing a harmless target onto a dangerous (and once more unpredictable) trajectory.

I've read about the numbers associated with the success ie it changed the orbital period of the target around its babysitter. But I've seen no evidence that the precise change was predictable. After showing that it is possible to hit a small target very far away and move it there's still the steep hill of moving it where you want to left to climb.

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MankindsError t1_itm5v1i wrote

I guess that's where distance and velocity come in? So if you only move it a small amount, over a great distance it would be enough to make a hit a miss? Say we have 18 months a millions upon millions of miles before impact. We push it successfully a short distance which makes its trajectory a miss for earth. We could then plan out where it will be in the future and in necessary do it again? I don't know much about the subject or the math that goes into something like this. It's just really interesting

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bestest_name_ever t1_itn8b87 wrote

Yes, this is pretty much spot on. Accuracy isn't actually important, because in a theoretical mission where we're saving earth, well, it was already going to hit. We can't accidentally make it double hit, so the only thing that matters is changing the orbit enough so it no longer hits. And because asteroids are inert, it doesn't even matter if the new course isn't perfectly safe and would still hit earth next time it comes around, because when we know of an asteroid we can track it, so that case would buy sufficient time to do another deflection mission.

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Adeldor t1_itm7t8u wrote

> I suspect such a system was chosen precisely because the degree and even direction of movement was unknown and unpredictable.

This target was chosen because the orbital parameters of Dimorphos about Didymos were precisely known, and its short orbital period of hours made it relatively quick and easy to determine the magnitude of change.

ETA: Also, Dimorphos' relatively small size made the changes larger, thus easier to measure.

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burtzev OP t1_itmirq1 wrote

I'm sure that there has to be more than one factor in choosing an appropriate target when there are thousands of possible choices. The size and orbital period of Dimorphos certainly come into play - once you have first decided to look at binary systems as the safest bet. Here's what Science Magazine had to say about the mission. I quote the relevant paragraph:

>NASA chose to conduct the test on a binary asteroid system for two reasons. First, even though the pair was not on a course to hit our planet, the 780-meter-wide Didymos served as a gravitational anchor during impact, ensuring that Dimorphos wasn’t inadvertently ricocheted toward Earth. And second, having a pair of space rocks locked in orbit made it easier for scientists to measure the asteroid’s deflection relative to its partner.

Ease of measurement is reason number 2. Safety is reason number 1. Like the old slogan says, "Safety First". Space missions aren't always planned so responsibly.

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Adeldor t1_itmwtun wrote

Curious. That doesn't gel with what I've read. For example, in this Wikipedia entry:

> "The Didymos system is not an Earth-crossing asteroid, and there is no possibility that the deflection experiment could create an impact hazard."

Further, in this preliminary presentation (PDF) by the planners of the DART mission, and in their subsequent paper (PDF), there's no mention of the system's binary nature being selected specifically for safety. The ease of measurement afforded by it being binary and its well understood parameters are the reasons given.

It's a shame Science Magazine didn't include a reference for the claim:

> "Didymos served as a gravitational anchor during impact, ensuring that Dimorphos wasn’t inadvertently ricocheted toward Earth."

To avoid future misunderstanding, I'd love to see a more direct reference for that if you know of one!

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Xaxxon t1_itmhwc3 wrote

> the bigger the object the bigger we would need the craft to be for deflection, right?

Bigger or sooner. Either one is ok.

The earlier you change its course the less you need to change its course.

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hawklost t1_itmxsjb wrote

You are forgetting other major factors. Angle of approach. Speed of approach. Even composition of the object drastically changes requirements.

You could have an object the side of Texas and if it is heading at the perfect angle to hit directly, would be far far harder to actually redirect than something 5x bigger but is coming at a different angle.

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iqisoverrated t1_itpb7gf wrote

Depends on size, speed and how 'central' it would hit. Possibly also on composition (if it's very 'loose' then there's less effort to disperse it). All of these would determine how difficult it is to deflect...or whether it's possible at all. Beyond a certain size there's just nothing we can do.

But the idea is to detect them early and then have several years (5+) to stage a deflection mission. The further out you deflect the less change in its path is needed.

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FaufiffonFec t1_itmpai6 wrote

> Now that we know its entirely possible to deflect.

I don't think that the DART mission has shown that we have the ability to deflect a large asteroid.

If a planet killer shows up, we're dead.

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JBLeafturn t1_itn0j9n wrote

Planet killers are pretty easy to catch, though. Large bodies like that reflect more light. They've been mapped out and a planet killer is less that 1 in 12 billion chance in the next 100 years. The gap we have right now is bodies around 80-180M which would impact with the force of a few nuclear bombs, but are not enough to end civilization. It wouldn't be great if one of those hit, but it wouldn't end humanity. That's why DART was so important, it showed that we can give bodies in that range a pretty good shove in a short period of time.

https://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-list
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-very-real-effort-to-track-killer-asteroids-and-comets-180979206/

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Bensemus t1_itr9yuf wrote

It 100% did. Any impact on any body will move it. The greater the difference between the two objects the less change there will be.

With a planet killer asteroid it will be much larger so a DART sized craft will change its orbit much less but it will still change it. So for such an asteroid we ether need to hit it years out for that tiny change to have time to propagate or we hit it with something with more energy.

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Schyte96 t1_itpju3k wrote

I would say a decade of warning minimum. Getting any space mission off the ground takes years, and you want your deflection event to be as far out as possible. The flight time from launch to impact is also probably around a year on top as well.

But the good thing is that we don't necessarily need to scale up in size for a bigger rock. One impactor of a size we can launch on a current rocket can't get it done? No problem, send 10, or 100. The cost of the craft is going to be negligible on these, all it needs to have is a chunk of mass, some avionics, and an engine for course adjustments. All of these already exist, so you don't need to invent anything new. The biggest cost item is going to be the launch vehicles.

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BartyDeCanter t1_itmn3ev wrote

I'm not a rocket engineer, but I did work for several years as an astronomer at a now defunct observatory (pre-SST LINEAR) that was working on NEO research. Good news! We've well cataloged almost all of the NEOs large enough to cause an extinction level impact and are doing a good job of cataloging this that would "merely" cause widespread devastation. However, for objects that could cause local or regional destruction, we really need something like this in orbit. It's like insurance, you hope to never need it but you'll be glad if you do.

Edit: Missing "almost"

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HardShelledTurt t1_itndv2v wrote

How can you be sure they're all catalogued? You don't know what you don't know

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BartyDeCanter t1_itney45 wrote

That is, of course, an excellent point. What we do have is estimates from a few different methods (mass distribution, perturbation analysis, discovery curve, etc) and they are converging on <1000 NEOs larger than 1km. Here's a nice, though slightly outdated, graphic: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/neowise/pia14734.html

And a recent paper giving an estimate of 940+-10. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103521001342

&#x200B;

Edit: Article link

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Xbxbxb123 t1_itnkmx3 wrote

The simple answer is that you can estimate how many there are total by how many you've found and how hard you had to look.

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[deleted] t1_itmrj3w wrote

[removed]

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TheThingsWeMake t1_itn9yib wrote

Yeah. And clearly we knew it was approaching if we deflected it.

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The-Real-Radar t1_itnd1tv wrote

We did deflect an asteroid, but it wasn’t on a collision course whatsoever, we did it just to test if we could.

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blood_kite t1_itmsq37 wrote

‘Well our object collision budget is a million dollars. That lets us to track about 3 percent of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it’s a big ass sky.’

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Bar_Sinister t1_itnn8ng wrote

Thanks. I came looking for this, and to make it if I didn't find it.

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buffalosnow t1_itoncvi wrote

We need to know WHY they approach. What do they WANT?!

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OkOrdinary5299 t1_iu3j4ea wrote

Yes, it seems to be a successful experiment, but in practice, will they deflect the asteroid to the desired trajectory?

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Late-Bridge4036 t1_itnwo15 wrote

I don’t know if I should be impressed that so many “rocket scientists” are here in this discussion … Or so many wanna be’s ???

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Dolly-Sods-WV t1_itp0293 wrote

Warn us collision is imminent so we have time to look up and poof.

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bigcyc666 t1_itpcjiw wrote

Wonder if in the future some regimes will have the ability to redirect asteroid so it will be on collision trajectory.

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foma_kyniaev t1_itq62j0 wrote

Define planet killer asteroid. Was 15 km big Chicxulub impactor a planet killer? Is the 400m big Apophis?

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Bensemus t1_itrax6f wrote

Planet killer is one that threatens life on the planet. Earth wasn't destroyed by Mars sized impact so no asteroid is actually threatening the structure of the planet.

15km is pushing humans towards extinction but not guaranteed, billions would die. 400m would be a natural disaster that could kill millions or more, depending on where it hit.

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khorijinn t1_iuihujb wrote

A 15 km asteroid hit would be a planet savior, in that it would wipe out most or all of it's human infestation and give it time to recover from our damage.

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80Pound t1_ito1fp2 wrote

Unless we have a stockpile of asteroid “killers” (deflectors) we need better warning to build one.

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gamingthrowawway2021 t1_ito33m6 wrote

I'm more worried about gamma ray bursts and strange matter, although I think asteroids should be used to take advantage of resource shortages that Earth demands without ruining the planet's ecosystem. At the same time, asteroids do provide the Earth with some defense from the elements, especially our own Asteroid Belt.

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JKilla1288 t1_itneqqc wrote

I'm sure I'm missing something. But why not point something like constant infrared from earth pointed out into space that can detect when an asteroid crosses it. Cause at the same time it could monitor its direction,speed, size ect?

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FunnyTown3930 t1_itowzfq wrote

We should be so lucky to experience a planet-killing asteroid… We’re poised at the precipice of Oblivion at the hands of our own nuclear weapons! This is just a diversion by a news-manufacturing industry. We really are on a knife’s edge….

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WishWeHadStarships t1_itp636p wrote

An asteroid is not our problem. The probability of us wiping ourself out and all animal life on earth alongside/before us is much higher than an asteroid affecting our lives.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, earth historically has been hit by many asteroids. But given that we are in our last 100 years, I think we should have different priorities.

Space travel as EPIC as it and its R&D may be, should be halted alongside many other currently useless economic activities. We should be saving our plannet, guarantee life for the next hundreds of generations and maybe then, turn to exploring around us and watching for asteroids.

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12edDawn t1_itps3n8 wrote

if you consider space exploration and research a useless activity, I'm not sure you want to be subscribed to this Reddit.

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WishWeHadStarships t1_itz7d7p wrote

I love space and check out my USN I just think we have different priorities. What use is a space ship or anti asteroid technology if we are all dead which is guaranteed to happen in a 100 years vs a 0.00000000000x % chance of actually being alive during an asteroid impact.

Y’all trolling.

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dan_dares t1_itpby3b wrote

An asteroid MAY be a problem,

without looking, we don't know.

and without having a plan saved for a rainy day, it's basically planning to fail.

no one is looking to travel to an asteroid, this is about coming up with a really good plan and look out for something that might kill millions and harm the earths ecosystems (i'm talking about smaller than planet killers here, which there are many more)

it's also not an exclusive thing.

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YuriLR t1_itozcvq wrote

This is a non existent problem, once in millions of years ocurrence. Funding should be minimal and slow to reflect that. Sci Fi is entertainment folks.

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