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From: Cryptoengineer <petertrei@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: "Rising Odds Asteroid That Briefly Threatened Earth Will Hit
 Moon"
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2025 22:29:21 -0400
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On 4/18/2025 8:14 PM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Apr 2025 17:23:21 -0400, Cryptoengineer
> <petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Note: I signed out while finding this, but it should be generally
>>> available. If not, the point of the article is that it took only 10
>>> minutes to create two canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon by tossing
>>> rocks around.
>>
>> Just to clarify. The Schrodinger Impact Basin, which the article
>> refers to, is 312 km across. This is 50% larger than the Cicxulub
>> Crater the ended the dinosaurs, which was crated by an impactor
>> 10 km across.
>>
>> The current asteroid, 2024 YR4, is about 60m across, and about
>> one five millionth the mass of the Chicxulub impactor. Its a city
>> killer, not something that would cause a mass extinction.
>>
>> pt
> 
> Silly question perhaps, but could a standard ICBM be fired into space
> and have a hope in hell to (when detonated) turn a collision into a
> near miss?
> 
> (Am pretty sure I read an SF story where this was a theme)

Not an ICBM, but we could almost certainly divert it.

I call your attention to DART:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Asteroid_Redirection_Test
a few years ago.

in 2021, it impacted a spacecraft into  Dimorphos, a 1 km asteroid
orbiting another asteroid, Didymos. It altered its velocity
by 2.7 mm/sec.

YR4 is only 60m across, and if similar composition, 1/5000 the mass
of Didymos. A DART type impact could definitely change its speed
enough to miss Earth, given a few  years lead time.

More likely, it would smash it to smithereens.

pt