It’s essentially the same premise as the film Armageddon, however experts now say that if an asteroid was headed our way, a nuclear blast might just be enough to divert it. Using lab-based analogues, physicists have produced a proof-of-concept for just such an eventuality.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00It's essentially the same premise as the film Armageddon, however experts now say that
00:08if an asteroid was headed our way, a nuclear blast might just be enough to divert it.
00:13Experts recently conducted experiments in a lab, finding that if a large asteroid was
00:17on a collision course, we could circumvent the drills and simply detonate a massive nuke
00:21nearby it.
00:22In a lab, physicists used a high-frequency electromagnetic wave generator to produce
00:26a 1.5 megajoule X-ray.
00:29They then pointed it at an asteroid analog, a grain of silica glass, which was briefly
00:33in freefall.
00:34The X-ray burst, which was masquerading as one produced by a nuclear blast, peeled away
00:39a micrometer-thick layer of glass and created a shockwave across its surface, with the physicists
00:44saying, this is a proof of concept of what would happen with an asteroid in space if
00:48a nuclear bomb was blown nearby, adding that the blast and resulting X-ray burst would
00:53be enough to move an asteroid measuring around 2-3 miles in diameter off course.
00:57While NASA's Double Asteroid Redirect Test was a success, more research still needs to
01:01be done to ensure a collision with an asteroid could indeed redirect one of them entirely,
01:06meaning it's nice to know that we have a proof of concept for Plan B.