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There's no need to freak out yet, however. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration are on the case, and they're thinking about wielding a big Hammer.
Hammer stands for "Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response," which is an impressive name all on its own. Hammer's a concept at the moment, but if built, it would be a 30-foot-tall (9 meter), 8.8-ton spacecraft that could act as either an asteroid battering ram or as a delivery vehicle for a nuclear device. Let's call it the "nudge or nuke" option.
Bennu is a beast, according to the national lab. It's 1,664 times as heavy as the Titanic and measures more than five football fields in diameter. If it hit Earth, the impact would unleash 80,000 times the energy of the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima in 1945. It would be devastating.
Hammer is designed to launch using NASA's Delta IV Heavy rocket. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore published a paper in the journal Acta Astronautica in February that evaluates the options for using the spacecraft to successfully encourage Bennu to redirect from Earth.
The researchers say ramming the asteroid to change its course would be ideal, but it would need to be a "gentle nudge" that doesn't cause it to break up. It's a complicated proposition.
The team looked at a variety of scenarios. For example, if Earth started launching Hammer missions just 10 years before impact, "it was determined that it could take between 34 and 53 launches of the Delta IV Heavy rocket, each carrying a single Hammer impactor, to make a Bennu-class asteroid miss the Earth," the lab reported on Thursday.
All of this makes it sound like a gentle nudge might not be the best solution for big asteroids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @12:19PM (1 child)
If a nuke could work on an asteroid, maybe it could also work on climate change.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Monday March 19 2018, @05:15PM
Actually, nukes *would* work on climate change. It's called nuclear winter. (Well, later analysis said that nuclear autumn would be a better description, but that's less exciting.)
Mind you, that wouldn't improve things, since it would lead to years of crop failures and massive starvation, and probably a few more areas of the planet uninhabitable by entities that live for decades. (And lots of infant mortality among those with quicker generations to can clean out the hazardous mutations quickly.) But it would "solve" global warming. Unless it was done quite carefully (Hah! In *whose* backyard?) it could lead to a very temporary ice age. The CO2 levels are high enough, though, that as soon as the soot cleaned out of the stratosphere we'd be headed right back into "the big melt".
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