- #421
mfb
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I don't think that is practical. The atmosphere protects nicely against objects up to ~10 meters, and reduces the effects of a direct impact even above that size. On the moon, we would probably need more than 100 meters of rock to get a similar protection.Al_ said:You can put enough regolith overhead to make the asteroid risk on the Moon the same as the risk on Earth.
I don't think it is necessary either. Impacts of meter-sized objects are extremely rare. Earth is hit by about one object with 4 meters diameter per year. Moon would get hit by at most 10% that rate (conservative upper limit), the probability that such an object hits a large 1 square kilometer installation directly is 3*10-8, for an expected impact once every 300 million years. Objects with 1 meter diameter are probably more frequent by a factor 20-30, for an expected impact once every 10 million years - still completely negligible. Due to the lack of relevant atmosphere, an impact elsewhere would just generate some seismic waves and a few rocks and dust particles thrown around - for a meter-sized object this is completely irrelevant.