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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 Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @05:23PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @05:23PM (#655011)

    Reaction mass doesn't need to be a rocket exhaust. If we could land some apparatus combination of a slingshot, a digger, and a power plant on it, we could start throwing chunks of it to one side to get it accelerating in opposite direction.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 19 2018, @05:29PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 19 2018, @05:29PM (#655017) Journal

    I think the concept you're looking for is a variation of "mass driver". Yeah, that should work. A combination automatic catapult and automatic loader working for a few years should work. But you need to give the ejecta an orbit that won't cause problems. Probably anything outside of the orbital plane of the solar system would work, though.

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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Monday March 19 2018, @06:28PM (1 child)

    by ledow (5567) on Monday March 19 2018, @06:28PM (#655049) Homepage

    Cool, so we just have to land on it, build all kinds of equipment, break it up into a thousand bits in a zero-gravity environment using heavy pneumatic tools, when it weighs as much as 16 Great Pyramids, then apply thrust to each part and it to separate them and somehow fling the bits somewhere safe and sensible, and do it to enough of its mass to make a big enough dent to manoeuvre it.

    That sounds so much easier than just "let's stick a rocket on it pushing that way" (which is already a prohibitively expensive, dangerous, unlikely, and ineffectual method to start with).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @01:25PM (#655352)

      All right, you win, I quit. There's no escape. If it is going to hit the Earth, we'll just sit tight and suck our tears up.