Encouraging results from a computer simulation point to the use of nuclear devices as a viable defense against Earth-threatening asteroids that suddenly appear out of nowhere.
The Near-Earth Object Study Center at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory runs an asteroid impact simulation once every two years. The exercise earlier this year was the only one in which the fictional and menacing asteroid, dubbed “2021 PDC”, was detected just six months before its scheduled rendezvous with the Earth’s surface. Insufficient time was considered to implement a mitigation strategy, so participants focused primarily on disaster response. This served as a blunt reminder of our vulnerability to these unknown asteroids.
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Ideally, we would have a few years or even decades to assemble an answer, such as using the gravitational influence of a massive spacecraft to smoothly displace an asteroid from its Earth-bound trajectory. Alternatively, we could use kinetic impactors to change the path of an object or a nuclear device to break it into thousands of pieces. This last strategy, known as disruption, is the kind of thing we expect in stupid Hollywood movies, but it could work if it were done decades in advance; over the years, the resulting fragments would likely follow their own orbital journeys and no longer threaten Earth.
But as promising new research published in Acta Astronautica shows, the shutdown strategy may even work on asteroids that are months away from hitting Earth. This is very good news as it suggests that we have a chance to fight oncoming asteroids that suddenly and unexpectedly appear on our radar.
That a nuclear bomb or some other powerful device could be used to break an asteroid is hardly a revelation. The overarching question that entered the new study was the fate of the resulting fragments. It seemed possible that the resulting debris would continue its journey towards Earth, potentially making a bad situation even worse. The scientists behind the new paper, led by physicist Patrick King of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, have run simulations to study just that – the orbital trends of fragments coming out of a nuclear asteroid.
The study served as King’s PhD thesis while a student at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). King’s colleague Michael Owens, also at LLNL, developed a software program called Spheral, which modeled the persistent effects of a nuclear disruption on the fictional asteroid. Spheral tracked the fragments from the moment of detonation and as the resulting fragmentary cloud orbited the sun. The simulation also took into account the gravitational effects of other planetary bodies.
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