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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.'"
...his name is the sound his plan would make.
Bong Wie!
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.
Pack your bags kids! We're going to the moon!
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yes, but by breaking it into smaller chunks you are increasing the surface area of the impactor. Its mass obviously stays the same, so the surface area/mass ratio changes in your favour, which means more of the asteroid will get burned up in the atmosphere before hitting the Earth's surface. Of course it depends just how many bits you can smash it into as to whether or not this will be worthwhile.
Try it with ice cubes - fill two identical ice-cream tubs with water and freeze them. Smash one into bits (you don't need a nuclear warhead for this, but if you decide to use one please post a video on youtube) and put all the bits in a tray. Put the intact ice-lump onto a second tray and leave them side-by-side in the sun. See which one completely melts away first. Same amount of water, different mass/surface area ratios.