That was the alien spacecraft. We just assumed it was a rock

quote:

Originally posted by KBobAries:
I'd be more impressed had they launched a second craft a few miles behind the first to take photos of the collision; similar to the videos of atomic weapons tests.

Dan

They did. A small cube satellite was deployed a couple of weeks ago to follow behind at about 30 miles and took pictures of the impact.

Well someone's insurance rates are going to sky rocket

There probably would be a chain reaction caused by the other asteroids.

I believe it is a very commendable feat no matter how they reacted. There’s the basic conc, but they all came together as a team and accomplished a still very difficult task.

Space is BIG, to say the least, and objects are moving thousands of miles per hour relative to each other. Hitting a smaller asteroid that is revolving around another asteroid just added to this mission’s difficulty. We’ll done!

Also, hopefully this approach works in the future for actual threats. This was just an experiment to see the effects of the smaller asteroid in relation to the larger one, but I haven’t looked at news yet to see if that data has be obtained.

Right now on the Dimorphos Asteroid....

8 Ball in the side pocket!

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge; it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” — Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (n.p.: 1871).

Back when the idea of sending an impactor to hit and deflect an oncoming space rock was first posited by the scientific community, some of the people who find perpetual satisfaction from denying that anything good can ever result from anything the “government” does expressed their confident opinions that the accuracy required for such an endeavor was simply impossible. One of the objections that a similar crowd had to spending money on missile defense was that using one missile to destroy another was like “hitting one bullet with another bullet.” Whether that claim was made about this effort I don’t know (perhaps they have learned to keep their mouths shut regarding things they know nothing about), but if hitting one missile with another is like hitting a bullet in flight with another bullet, what was this like?

Will this effort be worth the effort and expense? There’s only one way to find out, but either way I am grateful to the people who made the attempt possible. For me it is one small flickering candle in the cursèd darkness of stupidity that engulfs us.

I think that "they" just proved that we have a lot of talent working for the USA.

Easy. I mean what would the MOA accuracy guarantee need to be to hit a football field size targe at a measly 1.1592301 x 10 to the 10th yards? I can account for the lead needed for a target at that range moving at a sedate 14,400 mph in my sleep.

Folks, that's a heck of a shot. No, we probably didn't move the rock much, but we proved we can hit it. Pretty much dead center from the look of it.

there might have been an imperceptible change in its motion because of the impact but again its a result that may take months to become measurable but over the curse of months or years, it will have a much bigger effect.

with the diameter of the earth being about 7900 miles, a proper nudge that causes the rock to shift direction by about 4000 miles is the difference between a grazer through the atmosphere and a planet killer

It looks remarkably like the rock that hit my vehicle just the other day.

I think I heard somewhere in all the reporting around this, and that there is an astroid expected to pass inside our geosynchronous satellites in 2029.

Heard it was 1000 feet long.

That’s a little too close IMO.

It may not have changed the trajectory much, but I bet in 1000 years it will be quite a lot. If we knew that a comet will intercept Earth in 80 years, then it wouldn't take much to change that. I think it's a good thing that we are developing the ability to intercept near-Earth objects. This is the way it will be done. It won't be Bruce Willis in a shuttle.

One of the things I think about on occasion is Enrico Fermi’s “Where is everybody?” question in reference to intelligent life on other planets. He wasn’t the only one to raise the question that refers to the idea that if intelligent life exists elsewhere most of it would be far older and therefore far more technologically advanced than ours. It follows then that their existence should be obvious to us, and yet isn’t. That assumption strikes me as pretty weak and has been challenged by others, but it intrigues me enough to ponder if it’s true, then why?

One of the most likely reasons why technologically superior life forms haven’t made themselves known either deliberately or inadvertently is that very soon after they develop the capability of destroying themselves, that’s what they do. We are a perfect example of an intelligent, reasonably technologically advanced species that could, and probably will, destroy much of what has been achieved within the eyeblink of humanity’s time, i.e., the past couple of hundred years. It doesn’t matter if intelligent life arose on the nearest inhabitable planet a million years ago if 300,000 years later it reached our technological level, but then used that capability to end it within a few hundred years. That life may have continued to exist for the next 700 millenniums, but not at a level that could make itself known beyond its own atmosphere—if even to that degree.

But self-destruction by a variety of means such that humans possess isn’t the only thing that could cut short an intelligent life form’s existence.

quote:

Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
If we knew that a comet will intercept Earth in 80 years, then it wouldn't take much to change that.

If we were to detect such a comet today, then 80 years might be enough time to do something to prevent its destruction of most life on the planet. (There are plenty of reasons why we might not, but for this discussion assume the best.) But our ability to detect such a thing 80 years in advance has existed for only an even shorter eyeblink of time than our present technological level, much less our ability to even think of doing anything about it. The “dinosaur killer” object hit the Earth an estimated 66 million years ago; that, however, is about 1.5 percent of the age of the Earth. If rather than striking the Earth 1.5% of its age in the past and well before the evolutionary rise of humans, what if that impact had been delayed by 1.5% of the planet’s age—i.e., today?

Or even assuming that we could affect the path of a 6-mile wide object now, what if it had arrived just 50 years ago, or at any other time in the past 300,000?

My point with all this is that if a Chicxulub-like asteroid had arrived at any time during humanity’s existence and snuffed it out, it probably would have been when our most advanced technologies were fire and chipped stone tools. Is something like that so common in the universe as to be inevitable on other planets and is the reason there are no advanced extraterrestrial species for us to be aware of? It may be logical to assume that intelligent life has arisen countless times and as much as millions of years ago, but what reason is there to believe that any specific example would have continued to exist to the present?

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:
"Collides"?? Sure appears like a landing to me.

Come on, we all know the difference between a collision and a landing is based on how much damage there is...

I think if anything could prevent humanity from annihilating itself, it’s the threat of a near earth object impacting the earth with significant consequences. Nothing make people work together better than a common threat. I’m also of the opinion that if E.T.s were to make contact with humanity, it wouldn’t be a good thing for humanity as they’d have nothing to gain from a less technologically advanced culture except perhaps, resources

quote:

Originally posted by CQB60:
I think if anything could prevent humanity from annihilating itself, it’s the threat of a near earth object impacting the earth with significant consequences. Nothing make people work together better than a common threat. I’m also of the opinion that if E.T.s were to make contact with humanity, it wouldn’t be a good thing for humanity as they’d have nothing to gain from a less technologically advanced culture except perhaps, resources

"To Serve Man"

Interesting photo on APOD - shows the asteroid and a plume of debris from the asteroid taken from the cubesat

^^^^^^^^
Quite an impressive tail. Photo in article.

Amazing photo of asteroid Dimorphos shows debris caused by DART
https://mol.im/a/11279565