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Center for Nonlinear Studies |
We are in the third year of a NASA advanced concepts (NIAC) program in planetary defense that is radically different from traditional methods such as deflection. In a number of recent papers and thousands of simulations (see our website below) we discuss a new approach to planetary defense that uses energy not momentum transfer to break apart the threat into small relatively small fragments (<~ 10m), allowing for extremely short mitigation time scales. The method uses an array of hypervelocity kinetic penetrators that mitigates the threat by pulverizing via strong shock and disassembly via gas/plasma expansion. This program can operate in any mode from terminal (hours to days of warning) to long warning times. In the short warning “terminal” mode the asteroid fragments enter the Earth's atmosphere which acts as a "beam dump" where the fragments burn up in the atmosphere and air burst, with the primary channel of energy going into spatially and temporally de-correlated shock waves. In the long warning time mode, the disassembled asteroid fragment cloud spreads and the fragments miss the Earth. This approach allows extremely rapid response, much lower launch mass, as well as a testable, and deployable approach with a logical roadmap to an operational planetary defense program using a single launcher solution such as a Falcon 9. As an extreme and not recommended terminal scenario, a 20 km/s 100m diameter asteroid can be mitigated with a few days prior to impact intercept. This program allows for effective defense against asteroids up to the km scale with larger threats using explosive penetrators with smaller launch vehicles or passive penetrators with larger launch vehicles such as a Falcon Heavy, SLS or Starship. For large threats using NED penetrators, the use of sequential passive penetrators allows for NED detonation deep inside the threat giving a reasonably well tamped coupling. We also discuss recent simulations of the radiological effects of nuclear penetrators where we trace the radioisotopes generated over various intercept times as well as a number of NED’s from 2 KT to 1.2 MT in the extreme case where the activated fragments hit the Earth’s atmosphere.Group website: https://www.deepspace.ucsb.eduPI – planetary defense: https://www.deepspace.ucsb.edu/projects/pi-terminal-planetary-defenseGroup papers: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Philip_Lubin Bio: Philip Lubin is a professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbara whose primary research has been focused on studies of the early universe in the millimeter wavelengths bands, applications of directed energy for planetary defense and propulsion and multi-modal planetary defense using hypervelocity penetrators. His group has designed, developed and fielded more than two dozen ground based and balloon borne missions and helped develop two major cosmology satellites. Among other accomplishments his group first detected the horizon scale fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background from both their South Pole and balloon borne systems in 1991 and their latest results, along with an international team of ESA and NASA researchers, are from the Planck cosmology mission which have mapped in exquisite detail the structures of the early universe. He is a co-I on the Planck mission. His group has worked on applications of directed energy systems for a wide variety of applications including fast solar systems missions, lunar applications and future large scale systems for planetary defense and systems to allow small interstellar probes to achieve relativistic speeds. His group has worked on a variety of planetary defense applications including recent hypervelocity penetrator mitigation using both passive and active (explosive) penetrators. He is co-recipient of the 2006 Gruber Prize in Cosmology along with the COBE science team for their groundbreaking work in cosmology as well as the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology along with the Planck science team for their determination of fundamental cosmological parameter. He has published more than 500 papers.
Host: Romain Perriot (rperriot@lanl.gov)