Questions tagged [asteroids]
This is a tag for asteroids, not dwarf planets or any other astronomical object.
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Calculating asteroid impact blast wave properties
One of the biggest arguments against large nuclear devices is that most of the energy escapes into space. My limited understanding is that this happens because when the shockwave is still in the ...
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Will a nuclear blast just above the surface of an asteroid push it, or just heat it and maybe produce outgassing?
Will a nuclear blast just above the surface of an asteroid push/nudge it, or just heat it and maybe produce outgassing? In other words, would nukes be actually useful to deflect asteroids?
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Would it be possible to build a device or structure that could absorb the impact of an asteroid?
This is probably a stupid question but as the title says would this be possible. I'm imagining some kind of large structure which absorbs the impact rather than deflects it and then, a step further ...
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Unruh Radiation from hovering?
I know that masses on their own don't produce Unruh radiation outside of black holes which produce a similar effect known as Hawking radiation. However, what if some observer hovers above the Earth ...
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How can one predict asteroid orbit, with the use of vector calculus?
If you are given, (or found) the position and velocity vectors of an asteroid how can one use this to predict its orbit?
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How do rubble pile asteroids form?
This Dr. Becky video describes the early history of the solar system. Why the Earth exists because of Saturn | Migration of Planets.
In it she talks about how a cloud of nanometer to centimeter sized ...
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Where on the orbit of 101955 Bennu would an impact deflection mission have the most chance of success
Asteroid Bennu has a slight change of impact with Earth in the year 2135 (or 2182) and thus is a prime candidate for a future deflection mission using an impact spacecraft.
Given that the orbit of ...
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How fast can the ejecta from an asteroid impact go, while remaining solid?
A large asteroid strikes Earth hard enough so that chunks of rock from Earth are ejected back into space.
Roughly how fast could these ejected chunks go, without receiving so much heat energy they ...
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How many bonds need to break in a homogenous sphere of silica in order to halve the sphere
I am trying to calculate the energy it would take to destroy a small celestial object made solely of silica. A lot of literature have defined the energy required to shatter a celestial object as the ...
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Deriving the destruction energies of asteroids
I wanted to check the validity of an expression for the energy required to destroy an asteroid.
Assuming that the asteroid is spherical, the gravitational binding energy can be given as
$U_{GBE} = 3/5 ...
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Why did NASA need to observationally confirm whether DART successfully redirected Dimorphos?
NASA's DART impactor made a head-on collision with the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022. A real-time video feed gave immediate confirmation of the direct hit. But according to this press ...
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Unusually cratered asteroid
Asteroid Mathilde is a rocky body in the solar system that seems to be more crater than asteroid.
Are these impact craters? If so, how did this body survive the impacts? It seems at first glance that ...
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Can nuclear bombs intended for mass destruction also be used to deflect asteroids? [closed]
As far as I know, there are two possible uses of nuclear bombs: for mass destruction and for deflecting asteroids. Can those two things be achieved with the same bombs? Or must they be designed in ...
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What is the optimal mass for deflecting an asteroid? [closed]
What is the optimal weight to launch at an asteroid to deflect it? Since kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity, it would seem that a very small mass going at a relativistic speed might ...
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Destroy an asteroid by EM waves by making its crystalline meshes enter in resonance?
Could we destroy an asteroid made of crystalline materials heading towards the Earth by bombarding it with electromagnetic rays, making its crystalline meshes enter in vibration resonance and ...
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