Protecting Earth from any large asteroid that may come our way is sophisticated. If you break the house rock into items, that would create a hellish rain of shrapnel. However, smashing one thing into an asteroid with out breaking it properly earlier than it nears Earth may change its trajectory, as may the “gravity tractor” strategy of parking one thing large proper subsequent to the asteroid. But these protecting measures solely work if we learn about the asteroid far forward of its projected landfall.
Researchers have been engaged on this downside for many years, however our hosts Leah Crane and Chelsea Whyte have some new concepts. In this episode of Dead Planets Society, they’re attempting to protect Earth for a change, as a substitute of wrecking it. Alive Planets Society, if you’ll.
To assist save the world, they’re joined by planetary astronomer and asteroid skilled Andy Rivkin at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Instead of sending one thing out to the asteroid, they’re fascinated with how to save Earth whereas staying comparatively close by. Could we design a web to catch an asteroid? Or use a tighter mesh materials that may act as a trampoline to chuck the asteroid in direction of Mars?
The thought of an enormous shield orbiting the planet is a tantalising one, not least as a result of any impacts it takes may make a sound and will function an alert system each time the planet was saved. Introducing: the asteroid gong.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
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