Hey can this thing swing by and grab Apophis and hurry the fuck up?
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Apophis missed the keyhole, so no chance of impact this century, sorry. It would be a much bigger event, too, about 10-30 times the energy.
But, this noise does remind me of 2004.
Huh didn't think the keyhole event was til 2028 swingby. Neat. Wonder if Esa or Jacsa can get probes up in time for its next approach.
Yeah, I misspoke. I meant "will miss", we've got enough observations that we know the "keyhole event" that was a possibility is no longer a possibility.
Fair. All jokes and nihilism aside. Someone should take advantage of the flyby to send something up to study it.
I think it's hard to justify since we've already done a successful asteroid rendezvous (a few, IIRC) and it's unclear (to me) what we could learn from studying the surface of this particular one or even studying from the surface of this one.
If we knew how to move it from solar orbit to terrestrial or lunar orbit and then use it as raw materials, that might be profitable. Or at least a nice engineering challenge on the way to profitable asteroid mining. But, I think the delta-V we'd have to achieve for that might me more than we are capable of right now.
I do wonder if we could put something on it and use it as part of a measurement tool, like how they can stitch together multiple 'scope sensors? I forget what the name of that is. Differential capture? Diffusion imaging?
It is an interesting opportunity, we rarely get such close flybys well predicted, but someone closer to the science / smarter than me would have to put together a mission plan.
Hence my wanting it done. 'We don't get close flybies all that often. Make the most of it.'
Things have been so wacky I think we need bingo cards for global events. We could charge for them and give bingo winners some of the proceeds.
There's a study that says the effects of an impact landing in water won't be as bad as thought.
Also there is a way of using nukes to detonate adjacent to an asteroid or comet that slows it down without a risk of fracturing it. The heat turns the surface red hot and makes it shoot out mass and slows it down more. So we can stop basically any asteroid as long as we see it.
The difference from the movie is that we should just end it already and force the asteroid to collide specifically to destroy us.
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https://imgur.com/QvgHU1m
Iβd be interested to see if they can capture it, rather than deflect the asteroid. We need to work on space-based manufacturing anyway, and itβd be convenient if we could get this thing parked at a Lagrange point for research and practice.
First reference to Bruce Willis.