Does Bruce Willis know?
Scary news: Asteroid may pass Earth by just 6,880km in October
NASA's preparing another round asteroid defence tests, thanks to the October fly-by of a rock that may come within a cosmic whisker of the Earth. Update: The figures below were later revised by scientists. See our followup story, here. The original article continues below. Asteroid 2012 TC4 is said rock, and is between ten …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 3rd August 2017 18:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
I don't get it...
I thought Hudson Hawk was a funny over the top theatrical comedy (It has Richard E. Grant ffs), and was most surprised when I watched an interview with Bruce Willis, and he was asked what one film did he wish he had never made, and surprise surprise, he named Hudson Hawk.
I lost all respect for Bruce Willis in that moment....
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Monday 31st July 2017 12:38 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...
Ahhh.. Starship Troopers.
A fine example of a book showing the futility of war then co-opted to make a film gloryfying war..
(And not even a very good one. About 20 minutes was all I could bear to watch. It joins a select few films that even my regularly-suspended disbelief could cope with..)
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Monday 31st July 2017 13:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...
I wouldn't call the book anti-war by any stretch of the imagination. Basically the book not-so-intimated that humanity was going to have to wipe out the Arachnids, rather than try to find any basis to communicate and reach a peace. Hence the 5 gallon drum of Raid.
The book was much superior to the movie, but I appreciated the movie as both a satire of war movie cliches and a satire of the media state. Whoever ran the TV network in the Starship Troopers future is basically using the Fox News/MSNBC/RTV playbook from today's cable news industry.
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Monday 31st July 2017 16:55 GMT theModge
Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...
I thought the book somewhat glorified the war and the idea you weren't a citizen unless you fought, where as the film was a satire.
I concur. I've heard arguments that Heinlein wrote starship troopers to show us a dystopia and that he wished to show us what a bad idea a society that really venerated the military to that degree was. Maybe I'm just not literary enough, but I just didn't get that feeling from him. He wanted snappy uniforms and synchronised marching and he wanted it now.
The film, conversely, dropped in a couple of little bits of subtle satire (the recruiting adds for example) in-between and otherwise fun action film, which is most fun if not entirely sober.
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Monday 31st July 2017 14:49 GMT My Alter Ego
Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...
Maybe it just me, but I really enjoyed both. Plus, I felt that the over-the-top jingoism was satire. Same goes for the sequel, where the recruiter coos at the baby and says "we need fresh meat for the grinder".
Slightly related - I once described the film as "Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers with gratuitous violence and nudity". I was corrected by somebody saying "the gratuitous violence and nudity description is redundant".
Would you like to know more?
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Monday 31st July 2017 18:15 GMT Alan Brown
Re: It's those damned Arachnids again...
"About 20 minutes was all I could bear to watch."
It's a pity you didn't. It's deliberately set in a future where the Nazis won(*) and in the style of Triumph of the Will. Once you get into the meat of the piece it's clear that it's an antiwar film.
(*) Didn't you notice everyone was blonde and aryan? Including the troopers from Buenos Ares?
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Monday 31st July 2017 07:17 GMT Pascal Monett
Indeed
Not only that, but when the article says "test how ready we are for a potential impact" - well I can answer that : we're not.
Any major asteroid strike in a populated area will just be mayhem, pure and simple. If we have advanced warning, there might be a way to evacuate, but given that this particular rock can pass 6,800km close or more than 200,000km away, if it did hit somewhere I don't think we would have the slightest idea of where before it was way too late to do anything about it.
As of now, our only chance for surviving an asteroid impact is that the asteroid itself is too small to do too much damage (with all due respect to the thousands who could potentially be killed even by a small one).
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Monday 31st July 2017 18:21 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Indeed
"Any major asteroid strike in a populated area will just be mayhem, pure and simple"
Airbursting fragments are worse, believe it or not.
Check out the simulations at https://craterhunter.wordpress.com/the-planetary-scaring-of-the-younger-dryas-impact-event/a-thermal-airburst-impact-structure/
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Monday 31st July 2017 19:15 GMT Captain DaFt
Re: Er, what defences?
"Er, what defences? "
The one where we collectively shake our fists at it, yelling "we know you're there!"
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Monday 31st July 2017 06:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
A lot of these rocks, as reported in the Daily Minor Planet newsletter, aren't spotted until they are a few days out from doing their (hopefully) flyby. So, unless someone has something ready to go, we're still basically screwed.
Now if someone has the technology that's fairly good to go, it might be nice to practice nudging/obliterating a few of those rocks. As this really is rocket science, time to bone up on it. For practice.
SMoD {Sweet Meteor of Death} still hasn't shown up in the neighborhood, dammit! Look at what got into the Whitehouse.
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Monday 31st July 2017 10:24 GMT lorisarvendu
We should only try a "nudge" if it's definitely going to hit, because "trying it out" on one that is going to safely miss might result in it's next pass being "on target".
Though of course then we'll be able to give it another nudge, and since we've had practice we'll be more confident that it will work.
I don't know which scenario is for the best...
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Monday 31st July 2017 18:23 GMT Alan Brown
"A lot of these rocks, as reported in the Daily Minor Planet newsletter, aren't spotted until they are a few days out from doing their (hopefully) flyby"
At lot more aren't spotted until a few days AFTER their flyby. They're dark and we're blindsided by the sun as they come from that direction. They show up as they go past and are intensely backlit for a few days.
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Monday 31st July 2017 12:40 GMT Ragarath
Re: Context
I'll go for it won't, space is big, mind-bogglingly big. The chance of a 10m asteroid hitting a sub 10m lump of metal in a corridor of mind-bogglingly big (can't be arsed to look it up) is very, very small.
But then again those 1 in a million chances do happen 9 times out of 10.
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Monday 31st July 2017 19:35 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Context
"Reactors in space exist."
Only 1 that the USA or Russians admit to (and it's been dead since the 1960s).
Radiothermal decay generators aren't reactors and in any case if any of them (or the reactor) burned up in the atmosphere the additional radioactivity would be barely noticeable.
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Wednesday 2nd August 2017 11:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Context
The Soviet Union launched a good number of reactors on their US-A ocean surveillance radar satellites (RORSATs). Their radar technology meant the satellite had to be in a very low orbit which precluded draggy solar panels, so they put a nuclear reactor onboard.
At the end of the mission, the spent core was meant to be fired into a disposal orbit, that didn't always happen. At least two cores returned to Earth, one in the South Atlantic, the other redecorated about 120,000km2 of North Canada with intensely radioactive debris of which only about 1% has been recovered.
Of the remainder, several spilled their liquid metal coolant which now contributes to orbital debris, at least one appears to be disintegrating in its graveyard orbit, and when they were working they were nightmares for gamma ray astronomers.
Fortunately, none have been launched since the late 1980s.
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Monday 31st July 2017 09:40 GMT Pen-y-gors
It's not that bad. They're just saying that limited observations give a range of values for the orbital parameters, but none of them involve asteroid and planet attempting to occupy the same volume of space at the same time. Just how far off is the question to resolve. Reasonably re-assuring I think.
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Monday 31st July 2017 23:06 GMT TheElder
The n body problem does not have an analytical solution. The numerical solutions converge very slowly. However the 2 body problem does have a solution. The closer it is to Earth the more the other bodies may be ignored.
Personally, I very much prefer the 2 body problem since convergence is easy to calculate and can be as fast as you wish (or slower).
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Monday 31st July 2017 17:57 GMT JJKing
Big margin for error.
Considering that geosync orbits are around 36,000kms and the rock is estimated to pass between 6,800 and 270,000kms away from us, has any thought been given to those targets sitting in the 36,000km area? If it clobbers one then I guess there won't be space debris whizzing round every 90 minutes* to clobber other geosync satellites.
*Scientific reference, space documentary Gravity.
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Tuesday 1st August 2017 21:02 GMT larokus
Re: Big margin for error.
Ah yes, that lovely documentary showcasing how our brave modern days astronauts most often jet around open space untethered.
Apparently astronauts of the future are a cowardly bunch, remaining largely tethered in their attempt to save Mark Watney from certain death on Mars. (save for that ballsy chemist)
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Tuesday 1st August 2017 00:02 GMT mrobaer
But can we afford it?
I remember reading that NASA/ESA were scheduling a mission to attempt to redirect asteroids. I'm too lazy to find out the original article but did find this: https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/01/19/future-of-asteroid-deflection-mission-to-be-decided-soon/
Will we really die because our fearless leaders couldn't afford to protect us? Or is it cheaper to build bunkers/arks for the elite a la Deep Impact & 2012?
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Tuesday 1st August 2017 13:05 GMT Stevie
Bah!
Our "asteroid defenses" involve "having a look" at the space mountain of certain death as it whooshes by? They gave the job to the Telescope Brigade? The same danglers that so decisively moved on the vexing question of Pluto not being a real planet?
Oh ffs!
Lasers! Atomic warheads! Space shuttles full of oil rig workers!