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From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
To: Rodent of Unusual Size <Ken.Coar@Golux.Com>
Cc: Flatware or Road Kill? <FoRK@xent.com>
Subject: Re: Asteroids anyone ?
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Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2002 12:24:25 +0200 (CEST)

On Thu, 25 Jul 2002, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:

> Doesn't apply to this one; you're off by three orders of magnitude.
> Only 2km diametre, this one.  Of course, that's still a lot of mass
> to hit the planet even if it *is* in the form of dust and gas.

Antimissile defense is designed to operate in ~LEO environment, and knocks
out stuff by kinetic kill or nearby nuking (damage by neutron flux
impacting the fissibles). It is *not* designed to apply a 100 MT warhead
(we don't have these, and synchonous impact is even more out of question)  
detonate-on-impact to a 28 km/s rock or rubble target. A 100 MT warhead
most assuredly will scarcely fragment a 2 km target in the few seconds
left before the impact. This is so obvious it doesn't even to need to be
modeled.

> Even if Shrub's wrist-rocket managed to vaporise it, we'd still get
> transference to the Earth's energy balance, only to the atmosphere
> rather than the litho- or hydrosphere.

The anti-missile defense is about worse than useless in this case. The
only way to protect is determining orbits at high precision and deflecting
long-term. Decades for targets this size.

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