[TML] Asteroid Deflection

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 15 Jul 2008 at 9:36, Rob Davenport wrote:

> Yeah, I was thinking in civilized systems, these dangerous rocks (not 
> near-C ones!) would be known years in advance and dealt with easily -
> probably like Alan said by just pushing it with a tug or maneuver drive
> (heck, if it's a comet, fit it with an M-drive, power plant, processing
> equipment and a computer and let it drive itself to a new orbit).
> 
> It's the frontier systems that I was wondering about - if they didn't have
> a good survey and a rock appeared on a collision course with "little time" 
> (i.e. months) - would they perhaps want to 'hire' a band of travellers 
> with a ship to jump it away.  But that's probably not as feasible like was 
> said - the jump field isn't big enough.
> 
> But they might hire a ship to push the body into a new orbit.  Not as 
> dramatic as I was thinking it might be, but might be useful.

Moving it with a ship will *take* months. And isn't as easy as it 
sounds.

Also, a decent sky survey given Traveller ships or "boats" to deploy 
the gear is apt to be really, really cheap. 

Using *current* tech it'd likely be doable for $10,000 or so if you 
were patient. All you need are simple telescopes and imaging gear 
saving to computetrs. Process the data elsewhere, and you'd likely 
get a "good enough" result in under a year.

Doing it from the *ground* now is only expected to take a few 
million. 

It's one of those things that's cheap and a good idea.

Besides protecting against impacts, it also gives you warning of 
comets (you'd want to keep the system going to catch stuff like that) 
and gives you places for asteroid miner types to check out.

Comets are valuable to folks in space or on world with lousy 
atmospheres or low hydro because they are good sources of water, 
nitrogen and carbon.



--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com