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KitchenDepartment t1_itmczjs wrote

Reply to comment by MankindsError in Deflecting asteroids is not enough — we need to know when they approach by burtzev

Designing interplanetary probes takes years. You could probably speed that up in an emergency. But there are no manufacturer out there that are prepared to build probes rapidly.

Then you need to travel to the asteroid, and you want to hit it years in advance of the impact. Adding all that up you probably need something like 5-10 years of early warning. Depending on how devastating the impact would be.

If you want to be serous about planetary defense you should have one of these probes ready in advance in case we ever need it. A new falcon 9 rocket is launched every week. There would be no problem swapping out a payload in the event of a emergency. You could launch the probe in a matter of weeks instead of years.

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bjornbamse t1_itn714n wrote

Designing interplanetary probes takes years because if can take years and you put time and effort into designing experiments. If there is time pressure it can be done faster.

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Verbose_Code t1_itn9w10 wrote

Yeah I’d imagine if there was an extinction sized asteroid people (and money) would be mobilized very rapidly.

We also would not be aiming to do anything fancy. New solar panels that we want to raise the TRL on? Nope, we’re using a 2 decade old design. New engine with potentially 5% efficiency gain? Nope, just build a bigger spacecraft.

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Hypamania t1_itpj62g wrote

But if we simply let it land we can mine all of the resources!

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RandoCommentGuy t1_itnlpin wrote

Exactly, just look at climate change, people with money are flocking to fix the problem..../s

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Verbose_Code t1_itnmrl7 wrote

Climate change is a much slower and easier to ignore problem. Big difference between “in 100 years we will see sea levels rise by x amount” and “this asteroid will impact the earth in 714 days and will kill everyone”

There are also a lot of people making money on us not fixing climate change. There isn’t the same economic force preventing us from reacting to asteroid threats

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JUYED-AWK-YACC t1_ito0wqx wrote

From an engineer’s standpoint, a mission with no science instruments would be awesome. You could really get stuff done!

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KitchenDepartment t1_itr1i93 wrote

Yes. And because it takes years to figure out the science part. The industry that produces the rest of the spacecraft is set up to also work on year long timelines. Producing the thrusters for a satellite in a few weeks would just be a waste of resources. You would spend most of the year without a job.

It is possible to do things faster. If things are truly desperate I am sure the US military's would just snatch up every satellite engineer they can get ahold of and give them blanket checks to whatever they need to manufacture a probe as soon as possible. But probes require a lot of highly specific components. And if only one of them is missing the entire program grinds to a halt.

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kcahmadi t1_itnjvlz wrote

with companies like spaceX and rocketlab pumping out launches more than once a month now. they probably have inventory on hand where enough money and government priority will let them dedicate a rocket to it immediately

all you would need now would be trajectory analysis and a payload which could very well just be a warhead or even just have the rocket itself collide

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Alan_Smithee_ t1_itndvkc wrote

That’s assuming an impacter/kinetic probe is the only type; there’s also the Gravity Tractor, which offers more precision, but probably needs more lead time (the closer the asteroid is to earth, the more you have to deflect it.)

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