Quote:
Originally Posted by fchase8
I hadn't realized one couldn't detect an interstellar asteroid (makes sense). But that makes a orbiting one an interesting threat.
An asteroid whose irregular orbit will bring it closer & closer to Earth, flying pass every twenty years, until striking 100 years from now.
So there are basically four chances when its close enough to mess with - each time getting closer/easier to reach.
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My own schedule would be some thing like: 20 years from discovery and send a probe there for detailed analysis. This is crucial. If the question is "Can we play Cosmic Billiards (or bocce or shuffleboard) with this object?" then only certain answers you can get from a distance are negative ones.
This would be if the asteroid was a rubble pile or otherwise showed obvious structural faults. If it doesn't you really need to go and look closely for hidden ones. If the asteroid isn't very solid indeed you won't be landing a rocket engine (even an ion one) on it and changing its' course that way.
Lashing a solar or magnetic sail to it has similar issues. You'd have to put tin a very strong bag or spray it with Spiderman's web fluid or something like that.
Perhaps you could land a magnetic catapult on a dubious asteroid but the object isn't so much to change the course of the asteroid by throwing away part of its' mass but rather to disassemble it and throw it away entirely, piece by piece.
Anyway, back tot eh schedule. It's close approach 1, discovery. Close approach 2, probe mission. If suitable, the interval before close approach 3 is used to design and build the diversionary measure with launch on that close approach. Close approach 4 hopefully isn't very close. That's the sort of timeframe you need for the non-violent methods.