Scientists Propose Using Nuclear Bombs To Save Earth From Asteroid Impact

A group of physicists designed a first-of-its-kind experiment to simulate what might happen if a nuclear bomb was detonated near an asteroid approaching Earth. The experiment recorded in nanosecond detail how a very large pulse of radiation from a nuclear blast could essentially vaporize the side of an approaching asteroid, and change its trajectory.

Scientists and space agencies have been working hard to come up with a viable defense against a doomsday asteroid. NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission successfully changed the orbital path of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos by flying a spacecraft into it. Even Hollywood has pondered about how to handle an approaching asteroid threatening all of humanity, such as the 1998 movie Armageddon where nuclear warheads were detonated on the asteroid itself. Now, a group of physicists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have taken the nuclear approach to another level.

The team, led by physicist Nathan Moore, used Sandia’s Z machine, which uses magnetic fields to produce high temperatures and powerful X-rays, to fire X-rays at two mock asteroids, made up of tiny chips of quartz and silica being held up by a thin piece of metal foil. Moore remarked, “about 80 trillion watts of electricity” goes through the machine at around “100 billionths of a second.” He added, “That intense electrical surge compresses argon gas into a very hot plasma millions of degrees in temperature, and that emits a bubble of X-rays.”

Other scientists have previously looked at what might happen if a nuclear bomb was detonated near an asteroid, and the momentum of a bomb’s shock wave pushing against the asteroid. Moore’s team, however, believe the large amount of X-rays produced in the explosion would have a much larger effect in changing the asteroid’s trajectory than previously thought.

In the Sandia experiment, the X-rays exploded the surface of the chips, unleashing a cloud of vapor that propelled the chips away from the laser at 160mph (260km/hr). The models created by Moore and his colleagues suggest this should work on a much larger scale. The team remarked their calculations show that the basic idea is powerful enough to deflect asteroids up to around 4 kilometers in diameter.

Mary Burkey, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, remarked about the team’s findings as being “one of the first big blockbuster publications of trying to figure out on Earth how we can recreate how a nuclear deflection of an asteroid might go.”

Moore and his team hope to perform more tests on the X-ray-deflection technique in order to refine its overall effectiveness. He added one day a test similar to NASA’s DART mission might be possible, noting, “There’s nothing preventing us other than the desire to do that.”