Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource

On 5/03/2025 10:21 am, john larkin wrote:

On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 22:59:44 +0000, TTman <kraken.sankey@gmail.com>
wrote:
 

On 04/03/2025 02:02, Bill Sloman wrote:

The latest New Scientist talks about asteroid 2024 YR4 being downgraded
from a 1 in 32 chance of hitting Earth (the 17th February estimate) to a
one in 25,000 chance on the 24th February.
>
It's some where between 40 and 90 metres in diameter. Presumably there
are more smaller asteroids (which will be harder to see).
>
Eventually some military clown is going to get the idea finding a few of
them and sending up stick-on ion drives, so that the earth-grazing
orbits can be shifted into earth-impacting orbits.
>
A couple of them hitting Russian occupied-areas of the Ukraine would
upset Putin no end.
>

>
Excellent suggestion.! Needs some clever maths calcs though...

 Silly suggestion. You'd have to plan your wars 30 years in advance,
and you couldn't sign a peace treaty with the thing a week away from
hitting earth.

You wouldn't have just one of them, and the trick would be to have a bunch of them in orbits that could easily (and quickly) shifted from earth grazing to earth impacting. You might mot be able to shift it back into earth grazing in a week, but you could probably get it to hit the Pacific ocean rather than your enemy's territory.

We can launch a nuke in 20 minutes.

And everybody can see where it came from. Junk in the asteroid belt is anonymous, and an asteroid hitting the earth will vapourise anything that might otherwise have been traceable back to you.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney