The Aerie
Japanese space exploration doesn't make the news very often. I haven't been watching the televised news, so I don't know whether this got reviewed on the big news broadcasts or not. And I doubt whether this aspect of it has been explored. But Japan is on the verge of becoming a new world power by landing a probe on an asteroid.
Why?
Because while space is very large, very cold, and very black, space has other characteristics.
Space is very, very high. If you drop something from outer space, it will hit the ground hard. Really hard. Wiping-out-the-dinosaurs hard.
Space is also very, very smooth. Think about the fine Minnesota sport of curling: big, heavy stones are slid carefully along the ice in a game of frozen shuffleboard. One of the elements of the game is that once you start the rocks sliding, the smooth ice does very little to slow the rock down. Sweepers try to add and remove ice chips in order to affect the speed of the stones, but they slide for a long time on a fairly small push.
Space is smoother.
So Japan is trying to land its Hayabusa exploratory probe on an asteroid named Itokawa, and then retrieve samples and return to earth. Great, terrific science, love it.
But what if. What if instead of a science probe, something rather simpler was landed on the asteroid. What if instead of a science probe, an engine was landed on Itokawa.
It's a non-trivial proposition for sure. But Hayabusa addresses the greatest portion of them: flying to the asteroid; landing on it with precision; flying back to Earth.
Depending on the particular asteroid selected, Japan could do something simpler than land and return a robotic probe. Japan could land a motor. Land it in a very precise location. Adjust it with gimbals so it's pointing in exactly the right direction. Then fire it.
The asteroid changes course. With great precision, the asteroid starts heading for Earth. And because space is so smooth, all it has to do is be put on course for Earth, and it will keep going without any additional pushing. It doesn't have to get to Earth fast. Just nudge it along and wait.
Japan can do that now. Then they can make their demands. Or possibly not: maybe they choose a fairly small asteroid, and drop it very precisely on one of their enemies.
The impact could be more powerful than any existing single nuclear weapon. The only radioactivity it would release would come from the nuclear plants in the area. A nice, clean, precise, lethal and unstoppable non-nuclear weapon, with more power than a nuclear weapon.
This may sound like science fiction, but now that Japan has landed a probe on an asteroid, it's just science.
To think about what this is like, imagine that you're living with your neighbors at the bottom of a tall cliff. One of your neighbors builds a long pole, and reaches way, way up the cliff, and starts poking at one of the boulders high overhead. Everyone is very impressed.
Then at the back of the crowd someone says "Hey, couldn't he knock that down on our heads?"
The U.S. is currently fighting a lot of wars. The War in Iraq. The War on Terror. The War on Drugs. And the only successful war, the War on Good Taste.
But we're not paying attention to science. We're losing ground on engineering. And we're gutting our space administration.
Now another country is demonstrating the ability to rendezvous with an asteroid, and return to Earth.
Sure they're Japan. They're our ally. They have no cause to attack us. But they CAN. And while we waste so many resources on these other fruitless wars, we ignore an entirely new potential thrat.
Posted by Albatross at November 11, 2005 9:25 PM | TrackBack