In a new paper, an international team of researchers revisited the idea of blowing up an incoming asteroid with a nuclear warhead.
Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere. If they’re big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
And in case an even larger space rock were to ever threaten humanity, we’d have to get creative to keep it from colliding with our planet. Crashing a spacecraft into it like a pool ball to redirect its path — just like NASA did with its proof of concept Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in 2022 — may not always be on the table, given the many uncertainties involved.
In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers — including scientists from CERN and the University of Oxford — revisited the idea of blowing up an incoming asteroid with a nuclear warhead.
There are intuitive concerns. What if the asteroid shattered, turning a cosmic sniper shot into a shotgun blast of debris raining down over our planet?
But the team used CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) to study how asteroid materials react to different levels of physical stress, including large-scale simulations of nuclear deflection, and found that the space rocks are surprisingly resilient.
