Moon Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy

Em Seg 15 Mar 2004 17:58, Karell Ste-Marie escreveu:
(...)
> Sending an asteroid to a planet can create quite a bit of damage - how
> about the military being out there and having a few of these circling
> the earth just waiting to be sent down. I can think of a few countries
> that wouldn't have any problem with using that technique, especially
> since there aren't any radiation issues with a 2km asteroid coming down
> and hiting a huge city.
(...)

If you just want to smash a city then a rock with a few tens of meters will
suffice... The Tunguska Event is believed to have been caused by a rock of
that scale. Remember that the devastation caused by an asteroid impact is
just instant conversion of kinetic energy into heat; and since the density of
kinetic energy per mass will be huge for anything moving at many kilometers
per second, than even relatively small rocks have the power of our worse
nukes.

Now, a 2Km rock could easily devastate a whole continent, cause a mass
extinction event and (if our climate models are right) a "nuclear winter"
that would bring famine and disease over all Earth. I don't think that the
military would want that, unless their nation is off-Earth.