Destroying asteroid 2024 YR4 is the best option to stop it from hitting the Moon, it does have a 4% chance of hitting the Moon in December 2032
https://www.universetoday.com/articles/destroying-asteroid-2024-yr4-is-the-best-option-to-stop-it-from-hitting-the-moon
30 Comments
I’m still of the opinion that we should do the opposite, debris hitting satellites be damned. Do a DART-style mission and have it hit the moon while observing the whole thing. Then send Artemis astronauts to the new crater a few years later.
Nooo let it hit the Moon. I’d love to observe the impact and the possible massive meteor shower afterwards (and the ISS is probably long gone around then).
That’s absolutely NOT the “best” option. Nature has endured much, much worse. And the science that would come from this, even a near miss of the moon, would still open doors of knowledge.
The rush to destroy this thing is idiotic, especially if there’s a 96% chance of nothing happening at all. I’ll take the odds on that any day.
Is anyone in this thread aware that the diameter of this thing is only 60m (+/- 7)??? It wouldn’t damage much of anything even if it impacted the moon or earth. There’s almost no sense in launching a whole mission to divert it, other than fulfilling impulsive, infantile Hollywood-style sci-fi fantasies in people’s minds.
If only we could train oil riggers to be astronauts
Impact of the moon could give great data about subsurface material.
I think I’m still on Team Destroy/Deflect. While I agree there is a great scientific opportunity from an impact, we also need to be proactive about planetary defense if we are to expand our presence to Luna and beyond. Because the first few attempts at warding off asteroids will be failures or partial successes.
You know what, the Moon can go fuck itself. I say it’s time for an “Earth First” policy. I don’t want my tax dollars wasted on a foreign celestial object. MAKE EARTH GREAT AGAIN!
What’s the big problem with it hitting the moon?
As an alternative, how about we nuke the moon instead. Destroy the moon and make 2024 YR4 our new moon.
It misses the moon by 2 meters and uses it as a gravity sling to hit the Earth 😎
I dunno at the rate human civilization seems to be declining I think we should go ahead and just let it hit the moon.
cant you just push it out the way? i thought pushing an asteroid out the way was easier than destroying it?
**Question**: How positive are we that the world governments will work together to accomplish this feat?
At this point, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some way we can maneuver the earth in front of the asteroid to protect the moon.
Spoiler alert: It will not hit the moon in 2032. It just need some more observations to announce it for sure.
“Destroy”
Doesn’t that mean there will simply be a swarm of smaller objects hitting the Moon over a larger area, with some entering unpredictable trajectories that might intersect the Earth?
Why do we care if it hits the moon. If it does we get front row seats to a crater being formed. But the collision will not be big enough to actually affect us in any meaningful way.
Stopping it from hitting Earth would be worthwhile (incredibly so), but it hitting the moon is just a cool science observation.
The moon is alert slowly drifting away from the earth. Would an impact knock it further faster, slow it down, reverse course? I should probably read the article
Is there anything valuable that we would even need to deflect this? Or is it just practice
It’s so small it would hardly be worth stopping it from hitting earth.
It would be an opportunity to test the tech needed to do it with little risk to Earth itself.
As long as it’s 100% not hitting Earth, I’m good with leaving it alone. Don’t fuck with Mother Nature!
So, the world ends just before my retirement. Figures…
I don’t expect that destroying the asteroid has actually any real chance of changing the fact that it will hit the Moon (if that’s indeed where it will land).
What kind of explosion would it need to literally pulverize it? Anything else has a stronger chance of simply breaking it apart in smaller pieces, but still quite large. Then they might still hit the Moon or go in different and unforeseen directions, which might well be Earth.
The Moon has protected Earth exactly from that; let it do its job.
Why doesn’t the moon, the larger of the two celestial bodies, simply eat the smaller asteroid?
Let it hit. It’ll be fun.
If someone wants to reach it, then I want to see the slowing it down until the moon gravity captures it.
Call it moon², mun or mummy.
QUESTION: Exactly HOW would a megaton nuclear device detonated near the surface of an asteroid in vacuum destroy it? Although the energy released is equivalent to that of a million tons of conventional high explosive, the actual mass of the device is only 20 kilos of plutonium plus maybe another 100 of hydrogen isotopes. Upon achieving critical mass, the entire mass of the bomb and maybe another 500 kilos of its container becomes electrons and nuclei moving at relativistic velocity and radiation half of which is absorbed by the asteroid and half wasted into space; you don’t get the atmospheric heating that produces most of the blast effect in atmosphere. So WOULD the rock vaporization from the gammas be a bough to shatter the rest, since the impact of maybe 200 kilos of fission and fusion products would hardly be enough even moving at almost the speed of light.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[GNSS](/r/Space/comments/1nnreai/stub/nfn9fqo “Last usage”)|Global Navigation Satellite System(s)|
|[JWST](/r/Space/comments/1nnreai/stub/nfn6vt8 “Last usage”)|James Webb infra-red Space Telescope|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1nnreai/stub/nfn5c1c “Last usage”)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[NS](/r/Space/comments/1nnreai/stub/nfms2xk “Last usage”)|New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle, by Blue Origin|
| |Nova Scotia, Canada|
| |Neutron Star|
|[mT](/r/Space/comments/1nnreai/stub/nfmp2yr “Last usage”)|~~Milli-~~ *Metric* Tonnes|
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Nukes in space is like using a bb gun to stop a basket ball coming at you. Without an atmosphere, the blast effect required to destroy the asteroid will be minimal.
If it has a 4% chance to hit the moon, that means it has a 96% chance to not hit the moon.