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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, @01:47PM
When you crush the asteroid, the collection of its debris will retain the same amount of total kinetic energy (plus some from the blast), it will only posses much greater surface area - meaning there will be more braking in the atmosphere, and greater area of atmosphere might be affected than what would come under friction from one whole. That might help a bit for some smaller boulders, but there certainly is a size limit after which that approach would just incinerate the skies most everywhere.
Now, that gives me an idea: what if we could do that part (atmospheric entry braking) further from Earth, intercept asteroid with a projectile creating a blob of gas, or a ball of liquid, or a dense cloud of space junk pellets so that it would undergo friction without falling apart? Basically send up a huge blunderbuss to fire at it from the front (or from the rear if we want to push it through intersection zone before Earth gets there).