Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource

On 11/03/2025 11:43 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-03-10 15:28, Bill Sloman wrote:

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:

<snip>

Obviously I refer to objects of a dangerous size.

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And that means that you don't know what you are talking about.
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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.
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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.

 There is evidence of dangerous "objects" hitting the earth and causing destruction in the "historic" age.
 Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
 We were just fortunate that it hit a non populated area, otherwise it could have destroyed a city. The explosion was between 3 and 50 megatons.

You really are a twit. If you had bothered to read all the way through my post, you would have found exactly the same url (so it shows up twice in your post, which is a touch comical).
And the object didn't explode - it just came apart. Lots of very fast moving, very hot rocks rocks (it does seem to have a stony asteroid, which is presumably why it didn't make all the way down to the ground) would have produced a huge shock wave, so it might as well have exploded, but calling it an explosion implies that the energy emerged suddenly, rather than just coupling into the atmosphere when the air got dense enough to have a significant interaction with the fast moving rock.

https://www.researchgate.net/ publication/278734323_The_Compositional_Structure_of_the_Asteroid_Belt/ figures?lo=1
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There doesn't seem to be any reason to imagine that the distribution isn't smooth and monotonic.
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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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
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may have killed three people, but it did knock down a lot of trees.
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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