Nubile Projectile vs The Penetrator

"Right now we're minus one spacecraft," said Rick Grammier, Deep Impackt project manager at JPL. "It's been totally vaporized... as planned."

At last our knowledge of comets is more than skin deep. In a split seconds the Penetrator blasted off the Nubile Projectile's clothes, revealing what space weathering had obscured. She ain't pretty (but a billion years will do that to a gal), but now we know a bit more about her history than we could learn by passively watching a telescope... I wonder about the little jet on the right of the first picture - secondary explosion or a previously existing jet? A photographic artifact? Still the point to doing more! impactor based missions is that, as scientists put it:

we still do not understand the physics of space weathering well enough to [italics mine]confidently assay mineralogy of diverse asteroids by remote-sensing...

To find out more all we have to do is exert the same amount of force as over 6700 horses could exert over the course of an hour.

For the last decade it's been "fear the stranger, hate the stranger" - now some think we're at "kill the stranger" stage - but to me, this little bump in the sky at 23000 mph was filled with love. No-one was hurt in this smashup that didn't know what they were getting into...

Of course, the ultimate collision didn't quite live up to artistic expectations, but it did turn out that Tempel 1 was a great deal more firm than previously believed. If it weren't for their long periods, comets may turn out to be a great place for men to live.

Some wonder if Deep Impact has
anti-ballistic missile applications? Of course it does. Clementine-2 - the first designed impactor mission - was canceled in '93 because of it's association with SDI.
The problem is: hitting objects at long distances is a useful skill to have - whether you're a baseball player, or a nation worried about national defense, or a frustrated engineer that wants to know - quickly and cheaply - just what M and S class asteroids are made of. Still my favorite twinned body is Toutatis, shown here, passing by only a few lunar distances away last september.

I'm not the only one reaching for sexual analogies - the new scotsman calls this The big prang theory...

Labels: comets, deep impact, humor, space, space sports, space05

  ¶ 10:32 AM 0 comments

  the Nubile Projectile gets no respect

What the heck is Deep Impact, anyway?

National Geographic:

Scientists, who know very little about the interior of comets, hope the trash can-size projectile will smash a hole deep enough in the comet's icy exterior to reveal what lies inside it.

Deep Impact is a trashcan. We're flinging trashcans at 23,000 mph around the solar system?

No, actually - It's a table, and a washing machine!.

JPL calls Deep Impact an "Impactor" - which is about as sexless a term that NASA could come up with, which much have been chosen with great deliberation and forethought.

So, anyway, as Deep Impact is a washer, a dryer, a trashcan, a table, and an impactor, I know what it is now.

it's absolutely everything a 50s woman could use in space.

It's a washing machine:

Great. And what 2050s woman would want to do laundry? Let's hurl our appliances at the stars. What if we actually did start - purposefully - flinging our malfunctioning gear to immolate itself against various comets, asteroids, and worlds?

"Little Magee Mae, of Chicago, Illinois, smashed her 1975 gremlin against Phobos today, to great scientific result and satisfaction. Magee, who is a grandmother of 3, clapped her hands and twirled with glee. 'That'll teach that old stinker', she said. 'I been afraid to drive that for 65 years'."

"Bill Smith, of East Clinton, Texas, hit Toutatis with his Xbox 780 today. 'It made a better explosion in space than it ever did on the TV', he said."

"A group of internet enthusasists coated asteroid MN2004 today with a full spread of AOL subscription CDs. They note that the dramatic increase in reflectivity will help in tracking it when it passes by again in 2029. Some scientists expressed concerns about the Yorp Effect, but a spokesman for the group, tapping lightly against a map of Washington, said 'oh, no - we calculated for that precisely...'"

At least Deep Impact spacecraft ready for climax of comet-busting mission has a sexy title...

And 625,000 names on a mini-cd are getting smashed against it:

We don’t know what level of satisfaction the 625,000 will get knowing their name is going to be vapourised in space hitting a traditional symbol of woe and misfortune. However it is nice to know that they are involved in the highest smashing of a record ever recorded. Now why didn’t they include some Boyzone singles and some Bulgarian Popfolk while they were at it?

Not one single news article I've read talks about the potential material value of mining comets or asteroids... not one.

After the spectrographic analysis is performed (I have to stop reading these NASA press releases, it's making me overuse passive voice!), we'll be able to calculate the comet's value on earth, in dollars. It's liable to be a big number - but an even simpler number, if we could use the cometary materials IN space (in-situ), is easy to calculate. Launch costs from earth are well over 100,000.00 $/lb, and estimates for the comet's mass range from .1x10^14 to 2.2x10^14 kg, a kg is 2.2 lbs and thusly we could get a headline like:

Comet Tempel 1 worth 2.2 million trillion dollars in earth orbit!

Now look. That's a really big number. It's hard to cope with.

I wish it was possible to do a fantasy plot of this asset vs google's assets on some fictional stock exchange, and I remember how hard people tried to open new routes to India, Japan and the Americas.

It's easy to repeat this mission for other objects that are equally interesting - and closer. I am so tired about endless talk of defending against asteroids and never talk about using them. I'd go on - by I have written about it too many times before.

Labels: comets, deep impact, humor, space, space sports, space05

  ¶ 2:50 PM 0 comments

  Space Impacts as Sport

The Thrilla in the Chilla


"In this orbit, weighing in at Several Billion Tons, the great Comet, the Nubile Projectile, Tempel 1!, "

[audience hisses, roars]

"And in this orbit, the challenger: built by the most kick ass country on earth, and weighing in at eight hundred and twenty pounds: The Penetrator!

[audience roars]

They're Closing in at twenty three thousand miles an hour! What will happen when they meet?

Deep Impact is my favorite space mission of this decade.

Three reasons:

1) It's cheap, as such things go - only 333m/dollars - and much of that was spent on hardware that could be mass manufactured and used as a standard technique to figure out the true composition of the 1200+ near earth asteroids, dropping the cost per asteroid explored down below 20m/per.

The cost of today's space missions can be divided, nearly equally, into three parts - the cost of the hardware development, the cost of the launch itself, and the costs of creating and later maintaining the mission. Due to inexorable political factors, these costs tend to be roughly equal in modern probe design - and in (in the case of the jupiter/pluto lobby), oftentimes the hardware development and maintaining the mission far outweigh the launch costs.

Many proposed space missions seem to be nothing more than jobs programs for the people that design (and redesign) them - and I can't even bear to publish the costs of running Dawn for example, or the ludicrously misnamed 17 year+ (30 years, if you included the design stage) "pluto express" mission...

The mission duration of Deep Impact is only 6 months.

I favor a pull-back from the edges of the solar system in order to focus on finding and then utilizing resources that could give us a better springboard to further exploration. More launches would lower launch costs. A shorter mission duration maximizes the gain of information and minimizes the cost of operation. Using impacts, rather than passive sensing, results in fast in-depth spectrographic results from a variety of sources (the big scopes - Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra will be watching) that we'd otherwise spend months teasing out of the system... and standardized hardware equals lower production costs.

Mining asteroids and comets to provide materials for future exploration should be a no brainer - it's not as if greenpeace was floating around the solar system in little rubber spaceships, or as if spending 100k/lb to haul things up from earth made any sense...

2) The results of Deep Impact promise to be spectacular. I'm far more an engineer than a scientist - blowing things up to learn about them is direct, and almost 2nd nature to me.

3) I like to think that a more frequent pace of exploration would get us a better story about these objects than the interminable - "Asteroid XXYY to not destroy earth" articles. Heck I'd like to see more betting pools spring up... see space news covered on the sporting pages... and, hey, why couldn't they hire a sportswriter or two to add some friggen excitement to the event?

Stay tuned until 1.50AM July 4th for the Thrilla in the Chilla!Beeee Theree

Labels: comets, impactors, space, space sports, space05

  ¶ 6:52 PM 0 comments