With all the fuss surroundingthe unaired fly sheet - by of asteroid 2012 DA14 tomorrow , the national again rise of what could be done about an incoming space stack … if anything .
https://gizmodo.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-earths-close-shave-wi-5984263
The first time the likely danger of an asteroid impact was ever broached grow out , perhaps not surprisingly , to have been in a science fiction novel . What might be surprising , however , is that it was one published just timid of a C ago . Even more signally , the solution for escaping the danger is exactly the same as one being seriously proposed by NASA and many scientist .
attorney and secret novelist Arthur Train and Robert Wood , a Johns Hopkins University professor ( famous for his repudiation of “ N - rays ” — cue me to tell you all about that ) collaborated on a novel called The Moon Maker ( a subsequence to The Man Who Rocked the Earth — in which the author published the first - ever precise description of a atomic blast … but that ’s another article ) . The novel was serialise in Cosmopolitan back when Cosmo was a very different magazine publisher than it is now .
In Train and Wood ’s story , a starship called the Flying Ring is launch in answer to a menace to the ground by an errant asteroid , the 150 mile - wide Medusa ( composed primarily of pitchblende , by the elbow room ) , which is due to excise the ground . The asteroid was break and its deadly trajectory was calculate by a beautiful mathematical champion key Rhoda Gibbs , who joins the expedition as one of the astronauts .
The spaceship is nuclear - powered , being propelled by a beam of alpha particles give out by its disintegrate uranium fuel . After numerous escapade , the Flying Ring eventually intercepts Medusa . The dry land is save when the astronauts on board initiate a nuclear response on one aspect of the asteroid . The idea is not to destroy Medusa — which is much too adult — but to instead have a reaction that create a minuscule amount of thrust . This deflects the course of the asteroid just enough that when it eventually foil the orbit of the solid ground months by and by , it miss our satellite . rather it becomes a miniature second Sun Myung Moon ( and hence the title of the book ) .
The novel , by the way , utterly bears reading today : it hold up up inordinately well . The story is fill with great role ( not the least of whom is the irrepressibly manumit Rhoda ) , a lot of humour and some of the most scientifically precise descriptions of spaceflight ever written … even by today ’s standards .
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