Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource

On 10/03/2025 11:52 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-06 17:44, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 6/03/2025 10:54 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-06 04:06, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 6/03/2025 1:45 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-06 03:05, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 6/03/2025 8:28 am, Dave Platt wrote:

In article <vq8jtq$299g5$1@dont-email.me>,
Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:

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Do you really expect that any nation can do such a thing, and not have it
detected and traced back to the nation in question?  Outer space is
a lot more "visible" than something like the Manhattan Project was.

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But there is a lot of it, and most of the action would be happening a long way away from the earth - more than 93 million miles, on average.

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Russell's teapot :-p  :-)

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Not exactly. My claim was simply that observation would be difficult - not impossible - in the same way that it isn't impossible to intercept an intercontinetal ballasitc missile in mid-flight, but that the practical difficulties mean that nobody is trying to do it.
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Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal pretended that it was practical.

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The thing is, it is impossible to prove that there are no objects out there in an intercept orbit with earth.
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If you find one, you have proved it exists, but you can not prove the negative.

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And you'd be mad to try. Meteorites hit the earth every day, so there are clearly lots of small objects out there with intercept orbits with earth.

 Obviously I refer to objects of a dangerous size.

And that means that you don't know what you are talking about.
There's a whole distribution of space junk up there. The bigger they are, the more damage they can do when they hit the surface of the earth.
The historical record - in terms of meteor craters big enough to have survived for a few million years - demonstrates that big earth grazing asteroids are pretty rare. I imagine that somebody has worked out what the distribution is, at least roughly.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278734323_The_Compositional_Structure_of_the_Asteroid_Belt/figures?lo=1
There doesn't seem to be any reason to imagine that the distribution isn't smooth and monotonic.
A really small meteor - one only just big enough to make it the surface of the earth - could still kill you if it hit your head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
may have killed three people, but it did knock down a lot of trees.
It seems to have been a stony asteroid, rather than a lump of nickel-iron, and seems to have come apart at an altitude of of between five and ten kilometres.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney