Thread: asteroid impact

I think we can all learn something from the movie Armagedeon when Bruce Willis dug 800m into the Asteriod and blew it in two with a nuke, I'm not exactly convinced of the accuracy of this movie, BUT! there must be some truth. I mean its Newtonian law that every act has an equal and opposite reaction so an explosion of X magnitude could result in fragments going every which way and hopefully missing the Earth. Obviously very precious mearsuements would have to be made so as to not send a smaller yet still massive piece hurdling towards Earth at an even faster rate.

I must admit I'm not sure when to attempt to blow the thing to smithereens or simply nudge it off course. I'm inclined to attempt to nudge any and all potentially serious impactors off course. Let's take a planet-killer, with a diameter of 400 km. I believe our best approach with this beast would be to drill a hole, insert a nuke, and push the button. Any conceivable hole won't be more than a few hundred meters deep, and the energy from the blast won't do anything more than blast a pockmark into the side of this sized rock. Yet that action will produce an equal and opposite reaction, nudging the asteroid off course. Done soon enough, it'll be enough to prevent a direct hit.

Your arithmetic may be correct until you go to one billion pieces.. 6 miles in diameter is about the same volume as a cube 5 miles on each edge. 5 miles is 26,400 feet. 2.64 cubed = 18. 10,000 cubed is one trillion, so 18 trillion pieces averaging one cubic foot. Neil

I'm with you on this one. If it happens to be a "planet killer",I don't think we have the right stuff to make much difference. A smaller one,yeah. The insurance companies would really get a blast out of this scenario. Granted,it's just a matter of time till we get hit.We're still too busy fighting each other on this planet to pay any attention to such stuff. Did you ever read the book,Lucifer's Hammer ? Grim reality for planet Earth,fiction wise or real...

Originally Posted by Frogmarch

if a large object is broken into smaller pieces, then each of those small pieces will have a lower terminal velocity than the larger object would have had, due to their lower mass to air resistance ratio thing, so will do less damage upon impact.

there is an idea that a ship could be sent to an approaching asteroid, containing lots of robot diggers that could just dig, and throw out material from the asteroid, until it was gone.

The robot diggers thing would be nice,but how would they manage against a nickle/iron space bullet. The variables are just phenomenal,makes me feel kinda small ...