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Spitballing about DART & Dimorphos. Yes, actual scientists have done TONS of rocket science, impact calcs, modeling, scenarios, etc, & now are analyzing data for making this efficient & viable at redirecting killer asteroids. But this is just for funsies! A 🧵
This was basically a fast refrigerator hitting a stadium sized gravel pile. In my head, that's not what an asteroid was. They're MOUNTAINS. IN. SPACE. But as a lot of recent missions have shown, and asteroid researchers suspected for years, a lot are just loose piles of rubble.
They're loosely held together by static forces and gravity, but not that much gravity. If they're more potato than sphere, there's not enough compression to form them into solid bodies. So, less mountain, more ball pit. At least for these types of asteroids. Really surprised me.
If you think you know everything you need to know about the Aug 2020 blast that destroyed half of Beirut - a blast that Human Rights Watch in a recent report calls "one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history" - here are some things that might change your mind
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Did you know that an Oct 2020 FBI report concluded only 552 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded on 4 Aug 2020, a FIFTH of 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship in 2013 that was widely assumed from Day One to be the cause of the blast?
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reuters.com/world/middle-e…
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reuters.com/world/middle-e…
Did you know all those bags of "NITROPRILL HD" seen in the photos of the Beirut warehouse were NOT blasting agents? The HD means "high density" which is the way NH4NO3 is prilled for FERTILIZER! "Experts" like Jeffrey Lewis @ArmsControlWonk were wrong to suggest otherwise.
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