• Brainsploosh@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 years ago

    It’s funny, because tracking big rocks months/years in advance is what we currently do really well, and iirc we update all trajectories of all known objects orbiting earth at least every 11 days, and the main problem is figuring out which is which when they are maneuverable, not where they are going.

    There’s currently about 750 000 things being tracked in earth orbit. The total number of asteroids is about twice that, so without upgrades we can still refresh each object every month, and with active space flight I’d guess that would be done much much more often.

    Although, doing the math, enough Epstein drives (guesstimating tens) on a smaller asteroid could yield up to 1 m/s² acceleration, meaning an asteroid could traverse the distance from asteroid belt to earth in about a week.

    • nBodyProblem@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:

      • We are not well equipped for space situational awareness in cislunar space
      • There are many orders of magnitude more volume to observe in cislunar space than in the space below the GEO belt
      • The previous two bullets mean it’s difficult to find a non cooperative target once you lose it and the precision of any observations is poor. The sheer volume of space that need to be observed makes this issue nearly impossible to fix.
      • Trajectories in cislunar space are highly chaotic due to multi-body effects. Combine this with poor estimates of position and velocity, and our predictions of the future diverge rapidly from truth when propagating cislunar orbits.

      The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.

    • lol3droflxp@kbin.social
      5·
      2 years ago

      Well, if the rocks are sufficiently small and plenty as well as stealth coated (or at least painted black) they are still a nuisance with deadly potential.

      • PflaumeKordel@feddit.deEnglish
        13·
        2 years ago

        In The Expanse the group responsible for the attack stole the most advanced stealth coating in the Expanse universe to paint the asteroids, leaving Earth unable to detect them with anything but their most powerful sensors.