Space Telescope

There have been a host of big screen and television disaster movies featuring comets, meteors and asteroids either colliding with or on a collision course to earth. Big screen productions such as Meteor (1979), Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998) and the very recent Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012) feature huge extraterrestrial objects hurtling toward earth.

Discovery News quotes Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, head of NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Program Office, "On a daily basis, we're hit with basketball-sized objects, and Volkswagen-sized objects come in a few times a year."

Large scale impacts are not without precedent. National Geographic says scientists theorize that on June 30, 1908 a meteor may have crashed into a remote area of Siberia with a force of roughly 15 megatons.

I’ve read some stories that believe the asteroid named 2011AG5, which is 460 feet wide, could impact the earth in 2040. However, Yahoo News reports that NASA estimates the odds of 2011AG5 crashing into earth as a 1 (one) on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. (The likelihood of a collision is so low as to be effectively zero.)

But, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen; stranger things have occurred. After all, the Red Sox did win two World Series.

Courtesy Google Images

Enter, the Sentinel Mission. According to their website, the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group of independent scientists, is planning to raise funds to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission – a space telescope to be placed in orbit around the sun. The intent is to create a comprehensive map of our inner solar system illustrating the paths of 98% of the asteroids, both large and small. They hope to have the telescope in orbit within 10 years.

But I wonder, if a huge meteor is discovered bearing down on our hapless planet, would we be able to do anything more than brace for impact?

What do you think? Would you want to know if the world was going to end in 21 days?

Asteroid Mining

In 1848, at Sutter’s Creek, California, gold dust was discovered and the rush for gold was on. Within a year, 100,000 people migrated to California with the hope of striking it rich. In 1896, Rabbit Creek, in the Klondike Valley of the Yukon Territories was the scene of another golden discovery. According to The Last Best West, a prospector found a gold nugget and the ensuing Klondike Gold Rush drew 100,000 pilgrims to the gold fields of Canada.

Courtesy Google Images

In May, 2003, the Japanese launched a meteor probe named Hayabusa. It collected granules of meteoroid dust from the asteroid Itokawa and returned to earth with its space dust in June, 2010.

I think this mission was important for a couple of reasons. It gave scientists a glimpse of the composition of an asteroid and it proved that a space craft could land on and return from an asteroid. In 2016, NASA plans to send an unmanned rocket to an asteroid. The Telegraph reports that astronauts have begun training for a manned mission to an asteroid.

The significance to the gold rush? Asteroids could contain a host of precious metals and a group of business people have proposed mining asteroids. ABC News reports that Planetary Resources, Inc has a vision of collecting precious metals and water from space. Co-founder Eric Anderson said, "If you believe it's important to have continued prosperity for future generations, we need resources from somewhere."

The proposition won’t be cheap but these folks have the backing of some high rollers such as Larry Page, co-founder and CEO of Google and Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman.

I think it would be cool to mine asteroids; as long as we don't abandon manned space flight. What do you think; will this lead to a rush for metal ores in the great vacuum of space?

A New Old Use for Lasers

Remember the 80s: big hair, mullets, questionable rock music, Reaganomics? I think my most enduring memory of the 80s was President Ronald Regan’s Berlin Wall speech on June 12, 1987, in which he exhorted Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall had stood as a metaphor to the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union—democracy verses communism—from its construction in August, 1961 to its opening by East Germany in November, 1989 to its demolition by the end of 1990.

I think the fall of the Berlin Wall was symbolic of the fall of communism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). I’m not an historian but it is my belief that Ronald Reagan’s policies were the reason the USSR abandoned communism; he spent them into submission. He increased military expenditure to a level the USSR couldn’t match.

One lynchpin of Reagan’s policy included the military research for Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), commonly referred to as the Star Wars defense. The idea was to create a blanket of lasers to shoot down enemy nuclear warhead missiles. I remember the idea’s viability had encountered a lot of skepticism. The suggestion that lasers could render a country impervious to another country’s most powerful weapons sounded like the stuff science fiction writers made up.

According to Technovelgy.com, the first use of a laser weapon in fiction is the heat ray from H.G. Wells, “War of the Worlds,” published in 1898. “Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire” (Web edition of The War of the Worlds, John Walker, 1995).

Lasers are more than staples of science fiction weaponry. They have become integral parts of American industry. My own company employed a laser to cut fiberglass cloth used in the production of aircraft hardware. The laser was quicker and produced a more uniform pattern than cutting with handheld shears.

SDI lasers may be closer than we think. In the event a meteor threatened earth, DVICE .com reports that engineers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are developing an idea that would allow humans to deflect that meteor. A series of solar powered, mini-lasers in orbit would vaporize bits of rock on the surface of an asteroid to generate tiny puffs of thrust. Enough puffs over enough time would start to alter the orbit of a meteor, and with enough lasers working together, it could be accomplished on short notice.

Even the most farfetched concepts might come to fruition if you dare to put it out there for someone to come up with an educated plan. Even Reagan was on to something back in 1987.

What do you think; couldn't lasers used to deflect space rocks also deflect missiles?