Space Cowboys

For John, BLUF:  The European Space Agency wants to play bumper cars with an Asteroid.

What could possibly go wrong?

The European Space Agency is planning on smashing a space vehicle into an Asteroid in about 2020 AD.  (Here is an earlier article on line.)  They are looking at the Asteroid 65803 Didymos, and its smaller companion asteroid (Didymos is about 800 meters in diameter and the consort is about 150 meters in diameter).  The plan is to mug the smaller Asteroid with the 660 pound DART (The Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft.  Traveling in formation with DART will be ESA's Asteroid Impact Monitor (AIM) vehicle, to record the results.  The goal is to shift the small guy's trajectory by 0.5 to 1 percent (percent of what?).

If the European Space Agency did their sums correctly and everyone used the same units of measurement this might actually work.♠  I just hope that they don't disturb some other small Asteroid, which disturbs something else, which hits us, by accident.

I am glad it is the Europeans, and not us.  We already get blamed for enough.

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  In its story on the failed Mars Climate Orbiter, CNN says "Lockheed Martin engineering team used English units of measurement while the agency's team used the more conventional metric system".  On the set of CNN they all use the metric system?  The system that seems to relate to nothing with which we are familiar?