US Preparing For The Great Millstone (Rev 18:21)

NASA Destroying Asteroids With Nuclear Missiles, Monitoring Russian Satellites Among US Plans For Space Emergency

By Jeff Stone @JeffStone500 j.stone@ibtimes.com on June 25 2015 4:26 PM EDT

The U.S. government is at work on plans to monitor satellite activity as well as stopping asteroids with nuclear weapons. Here, the sky is illuminated as a meteor flies over Cancun, Mexico. Gerardo Garcia 

 

The U.S. Department of Defense is working with the intelligence community to develop a plan in the event of a Chinese or Russian attack on American space satellites. The plan, which includes the opening of a new operations center, coincides with the news that NASA is at work on an effort to fend off an asteroid with nuclear weapons.

“We are going to develop the tactics, techniques, procedures, rules of the road that would allow us … to fight the architecture and protect it while it’s under attack,” U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work said at the GEOINT intelligence conference this week, as quoted by Defense One.

“The ugly reality that we all must now face is that if an adversary were able to take space away from us, our ability to project decisive power across transoceanic distances and overmatch adversaries in theaters once we get there…would be critically weakened,” Work said.

The new operations center, based at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Virginia, will track spy and military satellites and enable the Defense Department to “double down” on geospatial intelligence, Work said. It would also increase the military’s ability to track what’s happening in foreign war zones, as Work alluded to the social media activity of Russian soldiers in Ukraine last year.

But the satellite coordination center is just the beginning of the government’s space defense plan. NASA has been busy putting together its own unrelated plan to decimate asteroids with nuclear weapons originally meant for international warfare. Another plan hinged on the idea that a nuclear weapon could somehow be dropped into the center of an asteroid, then detonated from within. It’s not clear whether a nuke would be powerful enough to destroy an asteroid, but detonating one above an asteroid might be enough to save humanity.

“A very modest change in the asteroid’s motion (only a few millimeters per second), acting over several years, can cause the asteroid to miss the Earth entirely,” NASA said in a statement.
“However, the trick is to gently nudge the asteroid out of harm’s way and not to blow it up. The latter option, though popular in the movies, only creates a bigger problem when all the pieces encounter Earth.”

Preparing Fruitlessly For The Millstone (Rev 18:21)

Hollywood may have got it right after all.

Nasa and the National Nuclear Security Administration have announced they are now working together on the possibility of destroying hazardous asteroids using nuclear weapons.

And like the film Armageddon – where Bruce Willis flies a space shuttle to an oncoming asteroid to drill a warhead into its core – the nuclear payload could be delivered by rocket.

‘Often, these agencies focus on their own pieces of the puzzle, so anything that brings them together is a good thing,’ said Bruce Betts, director of science and technology at the Planetary Society told the New York Times.

Scientists believe there are around one million near-Earth asteroids that could pose a threat to our planet – but only a tiny fraction have so far been detected.

Dramatic proof that any of these can strike Earth came on 15 February last year, when an unknown object exploded high above Chelyabinsk, Russia, with 20 – 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

The resulting shock wave caused widespread damage and injuries, making it the largest known natural object to have entered the atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event, which destroyed a forest area of Siberia.

Using a nuclear weapons to blow up asteroids may work particularly well on medium-sized asteroids and comets between 164 and 492 feet in diameter.

Some experts, however, claim that the resulting rock fragments could make the situation worse, and that deflecting an asteroid may prove to be a better solution.

Blowing up an asteroid with nuclear weapons has been proposed in the past.

Last year, an Iowa team outlined a similar vision at a Nasa conference, and say they would need just a weeks’ notice to launch if the system were developed.

Called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle, or HAIV, the craft would rendezvous with an asteroid in deep space.

It consists of a leader spacecraft, which would hit the comet and create blast crater.

Around a millisecond later, a follower spacecraft carrying nuclear explosives would hit inside the crater – which increases its effectiveness by up to 20 times.

Over the past two decades, Nasa has been looking for dangerous near-Earth asteroids larger than 1km in size, and claims to have found 98 per cent of them.

But existing asteroid detection systems can only track one per cent of the estimated objects that orbit the sun, according to asteroid mining firm Planetary Resources, who is partnering with Nasa on the project.

In a session at the SXSW conference in Texas last year, Nasa scientist Jason Kessler said: ‘The likelihood of something hitting us in the future is pretty guaranteed, although we’re not freaking out that there is an imminent threat.’

The date is the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in recent history – in 1908, when a cosmic intruder toppled millions of trees in Siberia with a blast judged a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bomb at leveled Hiroshima.