I know it’s just a movie, but how realistic is the science in the movie Armageddon?

Question

Would we really have a chance at blowing up a global-killer comet or asteroid? Would there be enough time to land on it and drill a hole, would it blow apart or change its trajectory, would we be able to stay in contact with the astronaut drillers while they were working, etc….

Oh yeah, I thought of something else that I noticed. The part where Liv Tyler's character is having a conversation with her dad while he is in space.......wouldn't there be several seconds of delay between each side of the conversation at that big of a distance?

Answer 1

The "science" in the movie Armageddon is terribly, horribly inaccurate. Almost every single thing that was said or done in that movie had something wrong with it.

Whether we could blow up a global-killer asteroid or comet is debatable, but we certainly wouldn't have a chance of stopping an asteroid that was only 18 days from impact. A rock that big, moving that fast, has a lot of momentum and one nuclear weapon certainly isn't going to split it in half. If we had, say, 20 years of warning, we could possibly use nukes to nudge it into a different orbit, but it would be the cumulative effect of lots of (relatively) small detonations, not one mega-blast that ends all of our problems.

Furthermore (you didn't ask, but I hate this movie so much I have to throw it in) THERE ARE NO ASTEROIDS THAT BIG IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM. The biggest known asteroid is Ceres, which, with a diameter of about 950 km, is far short of "the size of Texas". It's also just shy of being visible to the naked eye, so anything larger that would have been spotted a long, long, long time ago. There's no way a rock that big could sneak up on us and not be detected until it was only 18 days away. No chance, no way, no how.

And are we supposed to believe that NASA can just throw together extremely important missions in less than a month, when they spend YEARS preparing even the simplest space probes? Oh, sure, it's an emergency, right? Surely they'd cut some corners to get the job done faster, right? Well, there are only so many corners you can cut, and in the time required for NASA to put together a mission of this magnitude, involving many specialized tasks that have never been done before and many new machines that have never been tested...well, we'd be toast long before that ever got off the ground.

I realize it was just a dumb action movie and it's kinda pointless to pick on the science, but it wasn't even a GOOD action movie. It was predictable and annoying. But that's just my opinion.

Here's the Bad Astronomer's review of the movie. He's pretty much right on as far as the science is concerned:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/armpitageddon.html

Answer 2

Not very realistic.

1. An asteroid "the size of Texas" would have been discovered early in the 19th century, not last week. The only undiscovered asteroids capable of hitting the earth are less than 10 km across, and most less than 1 km across.

2. If we find such an asteroid, it is almost certain we will have centuries, not weeks, before any impact. Space is very very big, and collisions are very, very rare.

3. It would be much easier and safer to deflect an asteroid rather than destroy it. This could be a job as simple as wrapping the asteroid in white plastic wrap, which would increase the solar radiation pressure enough to move it out of the way.

4. On the other hand, many comets are in orbits of such long time periods that we don't know they're out there, and are discovered only when they're entering (or well within) the inner solar system. If we found a comet on a collision course with Earth, it's almost certain that we would have such a short amount of time that we wouldn't be able to do anything about it at all. Comets travel in highly elliptical orbits and (unless we were very lucky) would be almost impossible to intercept with current rockets.

Answer 3

The science in Armageddon was preposterous. "An asteroid the size of Texas" might, with some exaggeration, refer to Ceres, the largest asteroid. It certainly wouldn't be anonymous, and18 days away from collision it should be visible to the naked eye, not some government secret. A comet big enough to knock this object out of orbit would be far larger than any known comet. By the time it reached the asteroid belt, every telescope on the planet would be watching it. A nuclear bomb a few hundred feet beneath the surface of such an object would be about the same as an underground test on Earth. Even assuming you could exploit a flaw and crack the thing in two, no bomb would have enough energy to cause the halves to fly to either side of Earth.

There's plenty of other science and technology you could pick out, not to mention odd plot points such as why a portable drilling rig designed for planetary exploration would be equipped with a Gatling gun, but there's really no point. This movie was way beyond the point where I could suspend disbelief.

Answer 4

Blowing apart an asteroid is possible. Doing it anywhere near earth is probably a very bad idea. Ideally you could identify asteroids on collision courses years before impact. A mission could be sent to affix thrusters to the rock. the thrust could be applied to speed up, slow down, or laterally divert the asteroid. Any of these methods would work perfectly well. Which method used would probably depend on the geology of the asteroid and the projected subsequent orbit of the asteroid.. The earlier the discovery, the less thrust that would be required.
And the Armegeddon scene with the armed rover vehicle bursting out of the lander: I've never laughed so much during a movie in my life. How utterly absurd. That movie was terrible. Deep Impact was infinitely more realistic.

Answer 5

The science was not realistic at all. Just about every scientific aspect was wrong.

Scientists have come up with a better way to deflect asteroids: gravity towing.

Unlike the asteroid in Armageddon, most real asteroids are small (but deadly) piles of rubble. Trying to land on it or physically push it will just break it up into smaller, still-dangerous projectiles. Remember when the fragments of Shoemaker-Levy smashed into Jupiter? It would be like that: lots of bad collisions on earth.

Instead, it looks like we could tow asteroids using gravity. We'd probably have decades, or even centuries, to deflect an asteroid. So we'd put a spaceship near it, and just keep it hovering there to one side. Over time, the slight gravitic pull of the spaceship would change the asteroid's orbit, so we could avoid an impact with earth. The more time you have, the smaller the adjustments need to be.

Answer 6

They've pretty much determined that a bomb would be good in deflecting an asteroid when it's far, far away. And years in the future. Being so close to Earth, however - I think we're just creating more chunks of rock that'll hit us.

And - they were inside the orbit of the moon in the movie; the delay wouldn't be noticible - or hardly noticible.

Answer 7

The time needed to drill a hole of the size the story required would have been 3-4 weeks even on Earth.
A nuke detonated above the surface would do nothing as there is no atmosphere to carry any concussion. All you would do is irradiate the surface.

Answer 8

there our a lot of factors to consider, size and time of notice perhaps being the most important. an asteroid of considerable size probably would take a direct missile hit with little effect. the best option might be to drill a hole like in the movie and some have suggested detonating bombs in the vicinity of the asteroid, using the force (energy) to change its path.

Answer 9

The science is so bad that I walked out on the movie. It joins "They Live" as the only two films that fall into that category. I can usually suspend disbelief pretty easily, but Armageddon was so terrible that I was starting to yell at the movie in the theater.

"It's the size of Texas, sir!!!"

Um...... no.

Answer 10

Not at all.

We can crush or move a small rock (say 1 mile wide) but to tackle something hundreds of miles wide is impossible.