Surface or near-surface blast may be preferable, it has a more predictable effect - part of asteroid is ablated away, pushing the entire remaining asteroid, still in one piece. Especially if you have even just an approximate control over the location of the blast and thus, the direction of the...
"Discovered" in that legislation means "orbit known with high precision". This means that positions of almost all hazardous 1+ km asteroids are already known for decades in advance.
What would be the cost of transporting it to the users? LOX is much cheaper than petrol, thus it is usually it is produced right at the use site. Needs only air and electricity.
Yes. But ~30% conversion efficiency is a problem.
No, this wasn't the consensus. Interstellar objects were expected to be seen inevitably. A number of similar objects probably flew through our system undetected in the last ~200 years. As large survey telescopes become more numerous, we finally saw one.
Oh boy, *entire year* and we didn't see another one? I'm sure you know that in the last 400 years, this one is the first. Why are you surprised we didn't see two in 1 year timespan? Telescopes do improve, but not THAT fast.
What are you talking about?
Its behavior is explained quite well by a...
Well, the point was to recover stored energy. With unintended air liquefaction, that goal fails...
IIRC what they do currently is they inject and burn a bit of natural gas in the compressed air just before it enters the turbine.
?!
The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 required the detection of 90 percent of NEOs of 140 meters (around 459 feet) or larger by 2020. Even though it seems that NASA will miss that tight target, the coverage of 1+ km sized objects is already better than 90%:
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/...
Why this idea that "nukes wouldn't work" persists for so long? Try doing some back-of-envelope math. Nukes seem to work, unless we talk about 10+ km sized objects.
What are you talking about?? Moving either the Earth or the Moon by even a microscopic amount is totally beyond our capabilities in the next few thousands of years. Moving an asteroid is way more practical.
There are few other ideas (apart from ones in common use already, like hydro-storage).
(1) Use excess electrical energy to synthesize fuel from easily available source materials (such as air or water). Burn this fuel at night. (On Mars, probably use "air" as a source? CO2 -> O2 + CO). Does not...
It does not work that great. Air gets hotter as it is compressed. Then it cools down in the cavern. Then it gets cold when it's expanded through a turbine. IIRC sometimes up to partially becoming liquid :/
Germany is a very densely populated country. There are no big sunny deserted places. Also, 47+ degrees northern latitude... not great insolation (most of the CONUS territory is more southerly than that!).