News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Starship is still not understood by ceejayoz on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:27PM (#29029486)
> The sideways Δv between a 45° impact and LEO, 7 days in advance, is 3.5 m/s.

In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

You'd need a fairly obvious number of rockets to impart that sort of velocity change on a large one, right? And if you're doing it to a pebble, it doesn't matter too much?

Re:Starship is still not understood by ben_w on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:42PM (#29029783)
> In other words, the larger the comet, the better.

I don’t think so? If you’re bringing in a big one you need more engines to push it into the right orbit to start with, so I think the risk is always things that scale up directly with the comet’s mass, e.g. “the engines are misaligned by $foo degrees”.

Also, a pebble in space terms is still a potential city-killer, and no nation in their right mind is going to want to let a private company — not one of their own, let alone a private company in another nation if they have even the slightest say in the matter — wield that kind of potential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Crater

Re:Starship is still not understood by ceejayoz on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:46PM (#29029860)
In the "whoops" scenario (i.e. non-malicious), an engine misalignment would be apparent with enough time to correct. You're a year out.

We watch asteroids zing by regularly. The ones we know about have their chances of hitting calculated years or decades out.

Re:Starship is still not understood by ben_w on Thursday October 28, 2021 @03:11PM (#29030268)
Sideways motion is harder to determine than motion towards us; the former needs angular resolution, the latter doppler radar.

And the sort of rock that could shift 67P from a safe to a dangerous path (LEO to 45 degrees one year ahead) would be about 13 metres radius. The Wikipedia citation is 5 years old, so I don’t know what we know today, but in 2016 the estimate was we only knew somewhere around 1.3% of asteroids between 40m and 3.5m diameter (and 0.003% of smaller than that, because things get harder to spot as you get smaller).

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object#Size_distrib...

ArXiv link because the citation in Wikipedia was giving me a server error: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.06328.pdf