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Starks t1_jajadty wrote

Does DART scale up though? Would it be better to have a fleet of them, larger ones, or have more generic gravity tractors ready for longer-term defense options?

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arkham1010 t1_jajthiw wrote

Apparently there were plans for a bigger DART, called the Longer Adjustment Wide Nacelle, or LAWN-DART for short. However it was found that too many children were injured during research into LAWN-DARTS so the program was scrapped.

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rocketsocks t1_jajul22 wrote

It scales up to some degree. There are lots of different kinds of asteroids which might be a threat to Earth. The DART data represents the first entry in a spreadsheet which might be filled out well enough to start having confidence in one way to divert rubble pile asteroids.

What that could look like eventually in a hypothetical practical application would be a medium sized asteroid that was a threat many years (hopefully decades or centuries) into the future and a series of impactor vehicles being sent to apply a sufficient set of nudges to divert it away from the impact scenario. Realistically anything like that would be part of a family of systems with different operational characteristics to handle different bodies of different scales of threat over different timelines.

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Eaton_Rifles t1_jalhv6n wrote

Maybe it’s an asteroids game sort of approach, so you hit a smaller asteroid adjusting it’s orbit, bits of that then slam into the threatening asteroid with more effect than just using the original impact object...👍

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definitlynotchichi t1_jaknohe wrote

All of this will come with further research

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Ouatcheur t1_jalmv6b wrote

And in the case of gravity tractors: Lots and lots more further research. Maybe even an infinite amount of further research.

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