Killing killer asteroids with nuclear explosives: will this strategy work?
- Managing Editor
- Clay Dillingham
Averting a global disaster
- We have the technology to rendezvous with a killer asteroid and blow it up with a nuclear explosive.
- Initial simulations of this complex event on Los Alamos supercomputers give promising results.
- But accurate predictions require next generation exascale supercomputers.
Los Alamos astrophysicist Robert Weaver is working on how to protect humanity from a killer asteroid by using a nuclear explosive.
Weaver is not worried about the problem of intercepting an asteroid. He would count on the rocket power and operational control already developed by NASA to intercept a threatening object and deliver the nuclear device. NASA’s Dawn Mission has been able to place a spacecraft in orbit around Vesta, a huge almost-planet-size asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the NASA Deep Impact mission sent a probe into the nucleus of comet 9P/Tempel.
In other words, we have the technology to rendezvous with a killer object and try to blow it up with a nuclear explosive.
But will that strategy avert disaster?
*PDF can be best for printing and for viewing on Kindle and other readers