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No Bomb Powerful Enough To Destroy an On-Rushing Asteroid, Sorry Bruce Willis
coondoggie writes "Maybe it's the doom predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar this year, or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether or not the premise of Willis' 1998 'Armageddon' movie — where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth — could actually happen. The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
Indeed. A small nudge, if applied when the asteroid is still some distance from Earth, could have a considerable impact on it's trajectory. That would make an interesting project, simulating the relationship between time to asteroid, payload, asteroid mass and what not to determine how quickly we would need to react.
Very doubtful. But we could potentially build such a bomb if the Earth depended on it for some reason; the Teller-Ulam configuration scales indefinitely. The problem is it'd be way too massive to get off the ground.
Of course, these students were simply calculating the (very unrealistic) scenario found in the movie, of the asteroid right about to impact, and of deflection involving splitting it in half and having one half go each way around the Earth. As they note, more realistic deflection scenarios involve hitting it much earlier and simply trying to alter it's trajectory intact (but that's not fitting for Hollywood)
Also it should be noted that the Tsar Bomba mentioned in the article was deliberately cut down to half of its design yield (replacing the uranium tamper with a lead one) to make it burn cleaner. It was not only the biggest atomic bomb ever detonated on Earth, but also the cleanest per unit of energy output.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.