If an asteroid was headed our way, what would we do? Well, if the movies had it their way we would nuke it. However, experts have long said that at best that would likely only break the asteroid up into many pieces, which would still rain down on us, but now a new study has sought to see if blowing one up near an asteroid might be able to push it off course instead.
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00:04 If an asteroid was headed our way, what would we do?
00:07 Well, if the movie's headed their way, we would nuke it.
00:09 However, experts have long said that at best, that would likely only break the asteroid up into many pieces,
00:14 which would still rain down on us.
00:16 But now a new study has sought to see if blowing one up near an asteroid might be able to push it off course instead.
00:22 They developed a computer simulation to test a technique called nuclear ablation,
00:26 where the explosion's radiation actually vaporizes part of the space rock's surface.
00:30 That vapor is then predicted to produce thrust and push the asteroid away from its current trajectory.
00:36 They say this is an extremely computationally taxing prediction process,
00:39 as this study is looking to track the very photons penetrating into the asteroid from the explosion.
00:44 This new hypothetical model follows NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART mission, last year,
00:50 where they slowed the rotation of the dimorphous asteroid by an astounding 33 minutes,
00:55 simply by crashing a small spacecraft into it.
00:57 But the researchers who developed this simulation model say that in the event an impact scenario was discovered,
01:02 we would want every tool available at our disposal,
01:05 and nuclear weapons have the highest ratio of energy density per unit of mass of any human technology.
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