The Tractor Beam: Pulling Earth Out of the Fire
Star Trek has tractor beams that can push, pull, or hold an object in a steady position. Pushing and holding aren’t so hard to do, but emitting an energy beam that will draw an object toward the source of that beam is quite a trick. It seems like science
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The Tractor Beam: Pulling Earth Out of the Fire
Captain, our tractor beam caught and crushed an Air Force plane. It’ll be impossible to explain this as anything other than a genuine UFO. —Mr. Spock (TOS: Tomorrow is Yesterday)
5.1
Introduction
October 31, 2015 was a typical Halloween night around the world. Kids in costumes gathered candy. Teenagers toilet-papered houses and adults either dressed in more risqué costumes or followed the kids around. The ghosts of the dead supposedly rose from the grave to walk the Earth for one night. Perhaps an escaped murderer returned to take revenge on the residents of his hometown. Oh wait, that’s just a scary movie. Halloween can be scary if you want it to be, and this particular Halloween could have been a lot scarier than a horror movie. High in the sky, although not as high as you would like, a comet passed just outside the orbit of the Moon. Called 2015 TB145, this mass of compressed interplanetary dust flew past Earth just 300,000 miles above the surface, a mere 1.27 the average distance of the Earth to the Moon. A hurtling boulder 1960 ft (600 m) in diameter—that’s two New York City blocks worth of rock, metal and organic compounds—traveling at 78,000 miles per hour (125,500 kph). Pictures taken by astronomers as it passed our planet showed a silhouette eerily similar to a human skull, perfect for a Halloween night visitor. A celestial object passing so close to Earth is scary enough, yet the truly worrisome aspect of the episode was that scientists didn’t know it was approaching us, or that it existed at all, until October 10th. The orbit of TB145 is very oblong and is tilted with respect to the plane of Earth’s orbit. This is unusual for objects within the solar system and is one of the reasons scientists didn’t notice it until so late. Instead of approaching Earth with an east/west trajectory, it came upon us from the south, and there are fewer observatories in the Southern hemisphere.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 M.E. Lasbury, The Realization of Star Trek Technologies, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40914-6_5
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5 The Tractor Beam: Pulling Earth Out of the Fire
TB145’s orbit makes scientists believe it is a dead comet, or maybe an undead comet, considering the night it made its flyby. Comets have more oblong orbits and higher encounter velocities (average 35 kps/22 miles per second), which makes them more dangerous in collision scenarios. A dead comet is one that has lost all of its volatile elements, suggesting that TB145 has flown by Earth many times. Its next visit in 2088 presents no threat, it won’t get any closer than 25,000,000 miles (46,300,000 km). Don’t rest too easy, TB145 will be back in 2152 and could pass within the Moon’s orbital path on that transit. Had TB145 collided with Earth, the damage could have been extensive. If it hit land, the crater would have been almost eight miles (14.8 km) across—a definite city killer. An ocean impact would have sent a 200–300 ft (60–90 m) high tsunami rushing toward shore in every direct
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