I hope that this does not go wrong.

[Workingman]

NASA is about to smash a satellite into an asteroid. The asteroid, Dimorphos is a 'moon' of another, Didymos, in the Asteroid belt. The hope is to nudge it into a slightly different orbit in order to 'prove' that we could use the same process if a bigger asteroid ever threatens Earth.

So far, so good, but what of the unknowns?

Doing such a thing could upset the gravitational stability of that part of the asteroid belt and even further afield.

Some time ago I was reading about us mining asteroids and even taking them to the moon for mineral extraction. Two great concerns were that it was unknown what removing a very large asteroid, it would have to be large, a few km in diameter, to make it worthwhile, would do to the stability of gravitation in the belt. The other was about what would happen if one escaped en route to the Moon. These were blithely passed off as scare stories.

I sure hope that the scientist have got their maths right.

[Suff]

Agreed WM, there are significant unknown's here.

However, from what I understand, the asteroid chosen is not large enough to cause a huge event on it's own. Also they do need to know how these objects will affect the orbits of others around them. There are still comets and asteroids out there which threaten the asteroid belt. A collision there could cause a really huge problem for us and we do need to know how to handle it.

I prefer to believe that, like CERN, the scientits have modelled it enough to know the probably impact of the collision. CERN didn't cause black holes in the end. Just as predicted. But there was lots of news hype at the time about how it "might".

I do think, like you, that removing large asteroids for mining is likely to have a much larger impact on our safety than this experiment. However if this experiment gives us extensive data it can only make things safer in the long run.

Well that's my hope. We shall see.

[Suff]

You can watch it live here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RA8Tfa6Sck

We will see in just over an hour. That being said, given that it takes light 27 minutes to reach Earth from the Asteroid belt, it will hit in around half an hour. We just won't know until an hour from now.

[Workingman]

I watched it live on the NASA feed, but I am still not keen on the idea.

I once read of a comet some 21 million years ago that passed between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune when they, and Saturn, formed a triangle around the Sun. Jupiter at the back and Neptune and Saturn to each side. It is on a parabolic orbit so that we are not sure when it will come back: or on what path.

If the planets are aligned and it is near enough to the asteroid belt....

Because of its mass, asteroids (and other things) generally fall towards the Sun, but not into it (angular momentum and all that) but on their travels they do pass us - see the craters on Mars and its moons and our Moon. We are lucky that our atmosphere protects us and burns most of them up. "Shooting Stars" which we all like, would hit us if it was not for the atmosphere. When they do they are called meteoites and are usually small. Without the atmosphere they could be huge.

Then there is the stuff further out, from the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, which slam into the outer planets and their moons.

We cannot model all of this and be certain.

I am not afraid by any of this natural stuff, but I am not happy with scientists and engineers trying to play God.

[Suff]

I am not afraid by any of this natural stuff, but I am not happy with scientists and engineers trying to play God.

Just like the first Nuclear explosion, they need to do it in order to validate the models. They picked a relatively small target which they could model the energy flow and the impact of that energy. For real life planet savers, it would be scaled up dramatically.

With the sizes they are talking about I don't see any harm and if it advances the science of surviving an E.L.E, I'm with them.