When it comes to the 1998 disaster-thriller Armageddon of Michael Bay, it is out of progress. The film is a cult-classic that withstands on the strength of its rocking soundtrack (the theme of Aerosmith’s classic “Don’t Want to Miss A Thing”); a crazy ensemble cast of stars (including Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thorton, Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, Steve Buscemi, Owen Wilson, Jason Isaacs, William Fichter, and the late Michael Clarke Duncan); and the crazy premise (a massive ‘planet-kill Despite the fact that after Armageddon’s release, science is supporting the film’s strategy for averting… our extinction!
In a recent study published on Science Alert, it appears that a late-time small-body disruption defense system of Earth is actually a viable strategy against incoming asteroids. Late-time small-body disruption is designed to use nuclear arms to blow “relatively small” asteroids into pieces when they are detected less than a year out of colliding with Earth; according to the most recent reported findings of such a scenario, late-time small-body disruption would be a “very effective” (if not too complicated) means of protecting the planet.
According to physicist Patrick King of John Hopkins University Maryland, “One of the difficulties in assessing disruption is that you must model all of the fragment orbits,” which is generally more complicated than a simple deflection. To address these challenges, we must also look for solutions to consider disruption as a feasible strategy.”
As King states, this approach is actually slightly more complicated than it initially seemed. Blowing an asteroid still lays the problem of what happens with all debris that result from the explosion. There’s also the (literally) lesser difficulty of what to do if an asteroid that is larger than the rock that was mentioned in the Armageddon film begins to hit our feet. The study shows that late-time small-body disruption is still a means of preventing disaster; a well-placed nuke blast could allegedly reduce the impact mass of a planet-killer asteroid to just 1 percent if the rock is hit six months before it arrives us.
All that said, scientists are still looking for late-time small-body disruption as a last resort. The preferred method for deploying nukes in space is still deflection:
“We’ve focused on analyzing ‘late’ disruptions, meaning the impacting body is reorganized shortly before it impacts,” according to King. “When you have a lot of time typically ten years in length, kinetic impactors are generally used to deflect the impacting body.”
To this end, NASA and other similar agencies concerned with planet defense measures are still focused on what they believe to be the most crucial first step: early detection, as well as improved methods for predicting and modeling the results and debris trajectory after impact:
“Our group continues to refine our modeling approaches for nuclear deflection and disruption, as well as ongoing improvements to X-ray energy deposition modeling, which sets the initial blowoff and shock conditions for a nuclear disruption problem,” said Megan Bruck Syal of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Acta Astronautica has released a comprehensive study on late-time small-body disruption.