CSP training on micrometers
Paintball blasts proposed to save Earth from asteroids
It's one of those recurring problems science has yet to solve: how do we save Earth if one of our asteroid neighbors starts heading our way? We've noodled everything from tractor rafter , lasers , and even nuking them Armageddon style. A new proposal joining the chorus suggests hitting asteroids with stainless paintballs could do the trick — first by steering them off course with the oblige of impact, then by using the force of reflected sunlight bouncing off the enamel to slowly move the offender out of the way.
As you've guessed this won't be just a few paintballs, but a virtual asteroid redecoration with a waste of an estimated five tons of white paint. It's easy to be in sympathy with how the impact of five tons of anything might move an asteroid along, so why add paint?
Sung Wook Paek, a graduate admirer in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics came up with the concept and did the math using the asteroid Apophis, which could high us in 2029, to explain how his theory would work.
A little Finlander sharp-shooter
"Oh, then," said M. Struve, after hearing a allocate of the above, "a comely indiscretion your British inventor, and the narc too, would have made upon some of our Russian soldiers, according as they had seen in the haughtiness either one of the Brèo-brèjenski Mind, who stands with his uphold-epidermis shako, above seven feet hig ; or a trifling Finlander hurtful-shooter, who, with his unconditional sad-textile cap and quick stature, is under four and a half feet. Yes indeed, a very mistake; for the actual remoteness might have been almost image = 'prety damned quick', or only half, of whatever the refracting telescope and its micrometer wires had caused it to put in an appearance."
News
Team creates most powerful optical microscope everTG Daily - Mar 02, 2011
Guideline optical microscopes can only see clearly down to a resolution of one micrometer - 0.001 millimeters. But the new microscope can see objects 20 times smaller - indeed, it even breaks the debatable limit of optical microscopes.