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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: Earth-grazing asteroids as a military resource
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2025 01:28:33 +1100
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In-Reply-To: <0t33alxpnm.ln2@Telcontar.valinor>

On 10/03/2025 11:52 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> On 2025-03-06 17:44, Bill Sloman wrote:
>> On 6/03/2025 10:54 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>> On 2025-03-06 04:06, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>> On 6/03/2025 1:45 pm, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>>>> On 2025-03-06 03:05, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>>>> On 6/03/2025 8:28 am, Dave Platt wrote:
>>>>>>> In article <vq8jtq$299g5$1@dont-email.me>,
>>>>>>> Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ...
>>>
>>>
>>>>>>> Do you really expect that any nation can do such a thing, and not 
>>>>>>> have it
>>>>>>> detected and traced back to the nation in question?  Outer space is
>>>>>>> a lot more "visible" than something like the Manhattan Project was.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But there is a lot of it, and most of the action would be 
>>>>>> happening a long way away from the earth - more than 93 million 
>>>>>> miles, on average.
>>>>>
>>>>> Russell's teapot :-p  :-)
>>>>
>>>> Not exactly. My claim was simply that observation would be difficult 
>>>> - not impossible - in the same way that it isn't impossible to 
>>>> intercept an intercontinetal ballasitc missile in mid-flight, but 
>>>> that the practical difficulties mean that nobody is trying to do it.
>>>>
>>>> Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal pretended that it was practical.
>>>
>>> The thing is, it is impossible to prove that there are no objects out 
>>> there in an intercept orbit with earth.
>>>
>>> If you find one, you have proved it exists, but you can not prove the 
>>> negative.
>>
>> And you'd be mad to try. Meteorites hit the earth every day, so there 
>> are clearly lots of small objects out there with intercept orbits with 
>> earth.
> 
> Obviously I refer to objects of a dangerous size.

And that means that you don't know what you are talking about.

There's a whole distribution of space junk up there. The bigger they 
are, the more damage they can do when they hit the surface of the earth.

The historical record - in terms of meteor craters big enough to have 
survived for a few million years - demonstrates that big earth grazing 
asteroids are pretty rare. I imagine that somebody has worked out what 
the distribution is, at least roughly.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278734323_The_Compositional_Structure_of_the_Asteroid_Belt/figures?lo=1

There doesn't seem to be any reason to imagine that the distribution 
isn't smooth and monotonic.

A really small meteor - one only just big enough to make it the surface 
of the earth - could still kill you if it hit your head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

may have killed three people, but it did knock down a lot of trees.

It seems to have been a stony asteroid, rather than a lump of 
nickel-iron, and seems to have come apart at an altitude of of between 
five and ten kilometres.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney