Imagine If We Nuked an Asteroid

An asteroid races toward Earth. It's big, it's fast, and it's about to do a lot of damage. But we're not just going to sit around and wait for the end of days. We're going to fight back. "Wakanda forever!"

In the year 2175, the asteroid Bennu will pass by Earth, and there's a 1 in 2,700 chance that it will hit us. If those sound like good odds to you, think again. Bennu is taller than the Empire State Building, and it's 15 times heavier than the great pyramid of Giza. And if it hit the Earth, it would release as much energy as 23 Tsar Bombas, which is the largest hydrogen bomb ever exploded. Do you still like those odds? I'd like them a little more if we had a contingency plan. For NASA, that's the also known as HAMMER. And just like its name suggests, the plan is to ram into an incoming asteroid, or to detonate a nuke that will send it off course. The sooner we discover an asteroid heading our way, the safer we'll be.

For example, if we detected an incoming asteroid a year in advance, we'd only have to change its course by a few centimeters (inches) to keep it from hitting Earth. To do this, we could detonate a nuclear bomb a few hundred meters away from the asteroid, causing it to change its course and move away from Earth. And if that didn't work, we could just crash into the asteroid with the most powerful bomb we've got. But if anything were to malfunction before the bomb reached the asteroid, the resulting consequences might even be worse than the asteroid hitting Earth. But once the nuke was in space, the world's population would be relatively safe.

With no atmosphere out there, only vacuum, the blast would disappear completely, but the radiation would be much stronger. While people on Earth would be safe, anyone in any nearby spaceships would be risking their lives. In the interest of preventing as many casualties as possible, this would have to be an automated mission. And assuming that nothing goes wrong and there isn't some kind of AI mutiny, we could very well succeed in pushing an asteroid off course, as long as it wasn't too big.

A bigger asteroid would require bolder tactics, such as DART. DART stands for NASA plans to slam into an asteroid in 2022 to change its orbit. The impact will be equal to 3 tons of TNT. This mission could result in the first ever man-made meteorite shower, and if it works, it will serve as a blueprint of how we could respond to asteroid threats in the future. Of course, if it comes to destroying Bennu, the bomb we'll use will be at least a million times stronger than what DART will be packing. And yes, we've got nukes that are that powerful. The only thing we'd have to look out for, after blowing up a giant asteroid, is space debris.

The debris could severely damage our satellites, and endanger any astronauts aboard the International Space Station. And if any larger chunks of the asteroid found their way down to Earth, they could create craters up to 20 times their size. On the bright side, if the nuke exploded close enough to Earth, the radiation it emits would be distorted by our planet's magnetic field, which would probably be the prettiest light show you'd ever see. Or if you don't want to wait for a doomsday scenario, you could just take a trip up North to see the northern lights. It's crazy to think that nuking asteroids is a potential survival plan for humanity.