Re: "Rising Odds Asteroid That Briefly Threatened Earth Will Hit Moon"

On 4/18/2025 8:14 PM, The Horny Goat wrote:

On Fri, 4 Apr 2025 17:23:21 -0400, Cryptoengineer
<petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

Note: I signed out while finding this, but it should be generally
available. If not, the point of the article is that it took only 10
minutes to create two canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon by tossing
rocks around.

>
Just to clarify. The Schrodinger Impact Basin, which the article
refers to, is 312 km across. This is 50% larger than the Cicxulub
Crater the ended the dinosaurs, which was crated by an impactor
10 km across.
>
The current asteroid, 2024 YR4, is about 60m across, and about
one five millionth the mass of the Chicxulub impactor. Its a city
killer, not something that would cause a mass extinction.
>
pt

>
Silly question perhaps, but could a standard ICBM be fired into space
and have a hope in hell to (when detonated) turn a collision into a
near miss?
>
(Am pretty sure I read an SF story where this was a theme)

 Not an ICBM, but we could almost certainly divert it.
 I call your attention to DART:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test
a few years ago.
 in 2021, it impacted a spacecraft into  Dimorphos, a 1 km asteroid
orbiting another asteroid, Didymos. It altered its velocity
by 2.7 mm/sec.

YR4 is only 60m across, and if similar composition, 1/5000 the mass
of Didymos. A DART type impact could definitely change its speed
enough to miss Earth, given a few  years lead time.