Is there a proposed Asteroid missile defence system for Earth ?

[Advocate]

You remember incorrectly.

It was the Chinese who did that.

And I believe I'm correct in saying that this is something that neither the Americans nor the Russians have achieved.

Make of this what you will.

The US shot down a satellite (admittedly it was half way down anyway) this year with a ship launched missile. It was a failed spy sat.

[Churchill]

You remember incorrectly.

It was the Chinese who did that.

And I believe I'm correct in saying that this is something that neither the Americans nor the Russians have achieved.

Make of this what you will.

That's bollocks. The yanks destroyed a satellite with a missile launched from an F15.

[EternalOptimist]

The only defence we have a present is Norway's efforts to store every seed/plant species deep within an ark close to the north pole.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7082933.stm

IIRC there are about a dozen of these banks scattered around the planet, there seems to be a real problem keeping them up to date and in good nick

[TimberWolf]

IIRC there are about a dozen of these banks scattered around the planet, there seems to be a real problem keeping them up to date and in good nick:

Is that a bakers dozen?

IGMC

[HairyArsedBloke]

Doesn’t matter if it was the Chinese, Americans, Russians, Indians or the Welsh who managed to demonstrate some capability of hitting a de-orbiting satellite, it won’t help in anyway with a collision with any large object.

To try to supply a semi-sensible answer to the original nutty question....

The chances of the Earth being hit are 100%; it’s happened repeatedly in the past and there is no reason to believe that it won’t happen again. There has been a program of study of the so-called Near Earth Objects for over 10 years via an on-going sky survey. It has turned up several thousand objects about 10% are ‘big’ and about 20% are potentially collision candidates at some point in the next couple of billion years.

Blowing any potential large object will only create multiple smaller objects that would still provide a danger and would be impossible to model its trajectory. Any practical treatment of a ‘nasty’ is to effects its orbit. The means of doing this is the subject of study.

This is a very important field of research and should be properly funded, but there is no reason to panic. Nothing has been detected that is likely to hit Earth in the very near future. Before the conspiracy nutters say, “that ‘they’ are telling us”; you can’t hid something that big out in space. Someone is going to spot it, do the calculations and go public.

[wobbegong]

The boyfriend of one of the cheeky girls has an interest in this subject.

And there was me thinking we'd all be totally f***ed!

Hurrah for old wonky-face, the UKs' very own Bruce Willis, provided he can prize himself of that Romanian bag of bones long enough, that is.

[EternalOptimist]

If there's nothing we can do to prevent it, maybe we should concentrate more on what we would do if and when the news came in.

If I learned that I would only have ten months to live because a 500 ton asteroid was going to hit France, or somewhere, what would I do ?

I would get some serious sh@gging done, some heavy drinking and I would finish that book thats been hanging around on my shelf for the last year.
I would spend all my money but make sure I pay my VAT , because those b@stards probably have investigators in the afterlife

[DimPrawn]

I'm not worried.

I'm sure New Labour have a plan for this. It probably involves a long period of consultation, some legislation banning large near Earth objects, a database developed by EDS and a slant on green taxes just to be sure.

Sorteeeeeed

[threaded]

Doesn't matter anyway, because once the radio waves that have been emanating from Earth for the last hundred so years reach a real intelligent species they will send a very large rock our way at relativistic speed.

HTH

[Churchill]

Sorry, Nick, the septics did one a bit later than the Chinese.

And to give them their due, unlike the Chinese effort which was about 600 miles up, the septic one was low enough for all the bits to reenter quite quickly.

The cloud of crap from the Chinese exploit will be up there for decades, if not centuries.

Wiki is your friend...

From January 1984 to September 1986, two F-15As were used as launch platforms for the ASM-135 anti-satellite (ASAT) missile. The F-15As (76-0086 and 77-0084) were modified to carry one ASM-135 on the centerline station with extra equipment within a special centerline pylon.[32] The launch aircraft executed a Mach 1.22, 3.8 g climb at 65° to release the ASAT missile at an altitude of 38,100 feet (11.6 km). The flight computer was updated to control the zoom-climb and missile release. The third test flight involved a retired communications satellite in a 345 statute mile (555 km) orbit, which was successfully destroyed by kinetic energy. The pilot, USAF Major Wilbert D. "Doug" Pearson, became the only pilot to destroy a satellite.

The ASAT missile was designed to be a standoff anti-satellite weapon, with the F-15A acting as a first stage. The Soviet Union could interpret a U.S. rocket launch with a spy satellite loss, but an F-15 carrying an ASAT would blend in among hundreds of F-15 flights. The ASAT program involved five test launches; however, the missile was not known to have entered service. The program was officially terminated in 1988.

Churchill - In "I thenk yoooo!" mode!