The comet interceptor

It is a ship from the European Space Agency that will be in space in a few years and it is a low-budget mission, it is 200 million euros, to put it in perspective, launching an SLS rocket, that of the Artemis mission, costs 2 billion dollars. This mission would serve to hunt, send a ship directly towards an interstellar object or possibly a comet, just imagine that a comet comes on a collision course with the Earth.

One of the problems that humanity has right now to carry out a mission to destroy or divert it, because comets, in addition, we would have a fairly short time frame, a fundamental problem that we have now is that we would need a mission, to send a mission to examine that comet closely and have the data on it, the size, density, composition, etc., to be able to calibrate the response mission, in fact, every time they do because they make general simulations of what would happen if an asteroid or comet is on the path of collision with Earth.

There are simulations that are done practically every year and they all go wrong, the meteorite ends up impacting, one time in the simulation all of New York was destroyed, in another case it destroyed the center of Europe, etc. It ended badly and one of the problems is that a lot of time was wasted trying to send a mission or have the response mission prepared, but of course, in this case you would have the ship in space loaded with fuel and ready to shoot towards the target, be it an interstellar object like 3I/Atlas or an asteroid or a comet or whatever you wanted.

It would be a low-budget mission, when I criticize the issue of money that is dedicated to this or that, it is because it makes me angry, because other programs fall short or are not developed due to lack of money, it is bad for a nation not to invest in science and technology, yes, it is very bad, it is horrible because it is mortgaging its future, but it is just as bad that it burns that money on things that serve no purpose, at least it is my opinion

These drills are darkly humorous, especially when you analyze the failures that exist, because you see that many failures could be corrected by, for example, having a ship already ready to be able to go out to do the first inspection of the object, whether it is an asteroid or a comet, which is essential to be able to take the appropriate measures on how to divert it, whether to launch a ship loaded with nuclear missiles or whatever was necessary, or simply divert it in some way in order to avoid the disaster and a lot of time is lost in equipping a ship and sending it, and A lot of time is also wasted equipping a ship to respond.

I suppose that in a risk of planetary extinction some countries will unite to stop this investment and have a faster plan, yes, but those simulations are based on that, the simulations are done with hundreds of experts from all over the world, it is not only NASA, they are from agencies, most of the space agencies, in the last two I think there was also China and the simulation, they concentrate it in a series of days during a conference, that is, it would be the one that would last from the disappointment, in the case of a comet you can detect it, if it is a comet that is on a collision course with the earth, depending on the size, you could detect it a year in advance.

The bigger the worse, but you also detect it sooner, we have almost all the asteroids controlled, those larger than 1 km, a few are missing, but it would be bad luck if any of them came on a collision course with the Earth, even so the asteroids would have more time margin to act, so what they do is, having that time margin, one year, two or three or four, whatever they designate in the simulation, because they concentrate it in those two or three or four days that the conference lasts and they go moving data, what do you have, what resources are here, what spacecraft are there, what rockets can be launched, what instruments from telescopes or observatories can be used to obtain data on the objective and all that type of data is mobilized to know how to propose a planetary defense plan, so far they have all gone wrong.

What NASA's DART mission has demonstrated by impacting the Dimorfos asteroid is that it is more efficient to launch a ship against the asteroid to deflect it than to land it on the asteroid, landing it requires spending fuel, the fact of landing is also extremely complicated because the gravity is very low or practically non-existent, since you have to use fuel to do this braking, so the best thing is to impact directly and deflect the asteroid.

There would be another option to use a nuclear weapon, and make it explode, a few meters beforehand so that the radiation can push the asteroid, there are several options to achieve it quickly, then there are slow options, such as placing, for example, placing a panel so that the sun's rays hit it in a certain area and so that it deviates, but that is when you have a lot of time to spare or with laser rays, there are a lot of options that have been given in recent years, but I swear you have to have an interceptor ship to have precise data on the objects that threaten us.

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