would this work?

Question

If an asteroid was going to hit the Earth, could we use nuclear weapons, or would the radiation come back and hit us?

I konw a regular exploson would break it into thousands of peices, but it thought with the nuclear power we have today, and with more than one weapon, we could practicly vaporize the astroid.

Answer 1

It depends.

An asteroid coming at us from the leading side of our orbit, might be traveling at over 100 miles per second, much faster than any bullet or missle or spacecraft we have ever launched. Many asteroids that come near the earth, are not even detected until they have passed.

Some asteroids are so large, that all the nuclear weapons on earth could not stop them. They would have to be detected of millions of miles away just to deflect them.

One idea I have to divert asteroids, is to detect potential problem asteroids years in advance, and use solar powered rockets to divert them.

Answer 2

Nuclear weapons would only be effective against asteroids of a vaporisable size. That's so small that we probably wouldn't detect them until they were too close (Catch 22?). The radiation isn't a problem.

Vaporising a crater in a bigger asteroid does no good at all, because the rest of the asteroid will stay right on course.

Check out the web page for some serious considerations of the problem, and more practical solutions.

Answer 3

If the asteroid's trajectory is heading straight to earth, then It would make sense to deviate the path of the asteroid by some means (may be using embedded rockets that would give enough thrust to asteroid or by any other means). Even if we can deviate the asteroid by few meters, the trajectory will eventually take the asteroid in a totally different path, away from earth.

Answer 4

You could presumably use a series of nuclear detonations to alter the path of the asteroid to make it miss the earth. Even if you were able to vaporize the asteroid (which I doubt) the vapor would condense again as soon as it cooled down.

Answer 5

It would depend on how far out the asteroid was when you hit it with the weapon. If it was far enough out, you could conceivably redirect the energy of the asteroid to cause the pieces to miss the earth all together. Space is filled with radiation, so the results of the explosion would be negligible.

Answer 6

Of course we can. The nuclear bomb has waves. These waves break the asteroid and take all the pieces at both ends of the earth.

Answer 7

YOU WOULD BREAK THE ASTEROID INTO SMALLER PIECES THAT WOULD RAIN DOWN ALL OVER THE EARTH .

Opps Caps Lock

and spread the distruction around more