NASA Spacecraft to CRASH into Asteroid at 15,000 MPH 09/26/2022

You can watch this happen!

https://www.cbsnews.co​m …teroid-planetary-defense/

Would kind of suck if they end up diverting this the wrong way and it heads right towards us. Bruce is a bit old to head up there and blow the thing up.

Hopefully they don't completely whiff, either.

mannetti21 wrote in post #19419425
Hopefully they don't completely whiff, either.

Well technically, this one is suppose to miss us so a whiff is harmless. If they poke it and change it's course so it misses us more, that's good, but if they hit wrong and poke it towards us... well lots of movies about asteroids hitting the planet.

I sent this to a friend of mine.

He wants it to be rollercoaster exciting!!

gjl711 wrote in post #19419434
Well technically, this one is suppose to miss us so a whiff is harmless. If they poke it and change it's course so it misses us more, that's good, but if they hit wrong and poke it towards us... well lots of movies about asteroids hitting the planet.

I understand this one is not intended to hit Earth, but if they whiff, I've lost all confidence in their ability to divert an asteroid that may actually be on a collision course with us in the future.

They could also succeed and fail at the same time. Push it further away this time around and virtually guarantee a collision at a later date. Perhaps it’s too far into the future to matter but…

It reminds me of the Onion headline after the Chelyabinsk bolide in 2013. It was something to the effect of: "Hundreds injured by coolest freaking thing!"

Update:
We hit the target today, but now must wait "several days to weeks" to see if the impact was strong enough to alter the course.

https://www.npr.org …st-test-planetary-defense

jcothron wrote in post #19419643
They could also succeed and fail at the same time. Push it further away this time around and virtually guarantee a collision at a later date. Perhaps it’s too far into the future to matter but…

No- rather interesting, and safe, experiment.
They are aiming at one asteroid orbiting another If they succeed, the asteroid they are aiming at goes into a lower orbit, but stays orbiting the other asteroid. The center-of-mass keeps its current solar orbit. What they are looking for is how the orbit of their target changed within the pair of objects.