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posted by janrinok on Monday March 19 2018, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the nuke-it-from-orbit dept.

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. 


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  • (Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Monday March 19 2018, @02:22PM (3 children)

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Monday March 19 2018, @02:22PM (#654903)

    they probably were "bunk". 1/2mv^2. notice the velocity is squared. ever get hit by a strong gust of wind that knocked you down? lemme tell ya, the wind didn't have the mass you did but it still knocked you down. what they're talking about is throwing 50 little rocks at it really fast.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday March 19 2018, @03:18PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday March 19 2018, @03:18PM (#654944) Homepage
    The conservation law you should be looking at is that of momentum, not energy.

    And bennu's already got a freaking enormous v^2, we can change that barely a jot.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Monday March 19 2018, @06:25PM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Monday March 19 2018, @06:25PM (#655048) Homepage

    Which... would be no better than 1 big rock weighing as much as the 50 small ones at the same v, no?

    • (Score: 0) by fakefuck39 on Monday March 19 2018, @09:18PM

      by fakefuck39 (6620) on Monday March 19 2018, @09:18PM (#655132)

      yes, and if fish had fur they'd have lice. what exactly does your statement have to do with mine or the one I'm replying to?