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Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel

I just saw a History channel program about Killer Asteroids. Those TV college dark rimmed glasses wearing paper reading nerds are on it!
 
Discovery Channel says Bad Universe is on tonight at 10PM and repeats at 1am but my yahoo TV guide shows something else.

Guess I'll have to wait and see.
 
So far, if one comes at us we're in very deep doodie. They shot four typs. and we're still in d.d. and half through. (Waist deep in the biog muddy........)
 
Duplicating my post from Phil's blog:
Fantastic show, very entertaining!

Two quibbles:

1) I’ve seen the theory presented many times of shining a laser on an asteroid to create a gas ejection. But it is always demonstrated on Earth, with a stationary target. Aren’t most asteroids, y’know, rotating? Nothing is ever mentioned about stopping the rotation and it seems like it would be very difficult to do it enough to focus an unattached laser on a certain spot.

2)While the science presented is fascinating, I found the display of the ejecta cloud after an impact to be all wrong (I think!). The small particles wouldn’t rotate with the asteroid but continue out in a straight line from wherever it was ejected. And depending on the impact speed it would be easy for them to reach escape velocity, thus not staying too close to the rock.

btw, nice to see Australia get destroyed for a change.
 
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Okay what is Phil's obsession with destroying Sydney? - Every senario...did I save Sydney....nup :(
 
It was pretty good.

My only issue, Phil knows better than to perpetuate the myth that the asteroid belt looks like the TV/movie version of a bunch of rocks crowded together in space. Phil sold a tiny bit of his soul on that one for the sake of the usual TV sensationalism.
 
I thought the show was pretty great, for the most part (there were a few things- like the fact that many asteroids are rotating, as someone already mentioned- that probably had to be glossed over in this short, public interest format). The homemade comet was pretty cool, too! Much more illustrative than just calling it a 'dirty snowball.'
 
What sucks is that I don't own a television and there doesn't seem to be any way to watch it on line.
 
alfaniner said:
1) I’ve seen the theory presented many times of shining a laser on an asteroid to create a gas ejection. But it is always demonstrated on Earth, with a stationary target. Aren’t most asteroids, y’know, rotating? Nothing is ever mentioned about stopping the rotation and it seems like it would be very difficult to do it enough to focus an unattached laser on a certain spot.
Click to expand...
Why would it be necessary to stop rotation? It seems to me that the effectiveness of this technique would only depend on the whether the laser had sufficient power to vaporize a bit of whatever it was pointed at. If it does, you get that action/reaction thing going, and the asteroid moves one way while the gas blows off the other. It shouldn't be necessary to keep the gas blowing off the same spot, should it? Having it blow off in a ring around the asteroid should still work, since the direction it's blowing off at any given instant is the opposite of the way you want the asteroid to go.

alfaniner said:
2)While the science presented is fascinating, I found the display of the ejecta cloud after an impact to be all wrong (I think!). The small particles wouldn’t rotate with the asteroid but continue out in a straight line from wherever it was ejected.
Click to expand...
I didn't see the show, but I think you're right, the ejecta shouldn't continue to rotate with the asteroid.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It was pretty good.

My only issue, Phil knows better than to perpetuate the myth that the asteroid belt looks like the TV/movie version of a bunch of rocks crowded together in space. Phil sold a tiny bit of his soul on that one for the sake of the usual TV sensationalism.
Click to expand...

Go one light year away, and shoot it with a LONG telephoto lens, and it would indeed look somewhat like that...
 
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