New Best Way To Nuke a Short-Notice Asteroid

doug141 writes "A scientist proposes the best way to deal with an asteroid on short notice is to hit it with an impactor, followed by a nuke in the crater. From the article: 'Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing to attendees at the International Space Development Conference in La Jolla, Calif., on May 23. The annual National Space Society gathering attracted hundreds from the space industry around the world. An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said. The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid. The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted.'"

Comments

Re:how short is the notice?

[heypete]

If you have the time for it, sure.

As the article says,

A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added. Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.

It's not really possible to put big rocket motors on an asteroid and push it out of the way, as transporting enough fuel to the asteroid would be unbelievably expensive and likely infeasible with current technology.

Spin spin..

[hantms]

Don't asteroids usually spin? If you blast a crater on one side, then you have some serious aiming to do to hit the crater?

Re:Spin spin..

[AC-x]

Rocket scientists have managed to aim spacecraft to very specific points on spinning bodies before, I'm sure they'll manage.

Re:how short is the notice?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I believe we're quite capable of telling the composition from remote observation and adjusting the plan accordingly. Also, some M-type asteroids (such as 16 Psyche, to name the most notorious example) do have significant quantities of iron, but I don't think that the majority of even the metallic M-type asteroids are solid iron. "High likelihood" is really an exaggeration.