ASTR 1101 Chapter : Apr4 Astriod Impacts
Document Summary
How much money should the us spend annually ! 1 r a e y n o i l l i b. 1 b i l l i o n y e a r. 0 m i l l i o n y e a r. But : no (cid:1)smoking gun(cid:2) crater, open questions on death-dealing mechanism! !20 million tons of tnt: stony (cid:1)meteor(cid:2), half-a-football eld in size, airburst, 5 miles up! !such event: 0. 1 km, 1 km, 10 km, 100 km. !1 billion people per 50,000 years = 20,000 people/year: car crash! Detect:: telescopes catalog all earth- crossing asteroids, in a decade, we(cid:2)ll know almost all, calculate orbits ahead to see which! Deflect:: push on asteroid, change its orbit, slight de ection a century in advance will avoid the collision! How to deflect an asteroid: (cid:1)solar sails(cid:2), paint , nuclear bomb! !a compact asteroid might miss, ! a broken asteroid will certainly hit!
