nuclear weapons to destroy astroids?

Question

i was wonderin ever since we;ve been oa a collisoin course

Answer 1

I believe nuclear weapons could be used to push something off course. Blowing an asteroid to bits could be worse than doing nothing.

Answer 2

There is a theory that in the event of an imminent asteroid impact on earth, we would be able to launch a nuclear missile to destroy it before it hit earth. However, there are some problems with this solution...for example, the explosion may not completely destroy the asteroid, and chunks of debris may be sent towards earth, causing even more damage. However, there are other theories for preventing an asteroid impact. Two similar ones are that we could send a probe to either push or pull the asteroid, just enough so that gravity would make it miss the earth, which seems like a safer option, but it may be harder to do.

Answer 3

The size of a nuclear bomb which might be used to destroy an incoming asteroid would have to be huge to have any real effect.

What is much more important to determine is the physical makeup of the incoming asteroid. Is it made of iron and rock, or is it made of ice and dust. If it is of an ice and dust composition, then we could blow it up fairly easily and there would be no massive problem from the chunks of falling debris. Most of the debris would burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

On the other hand, if the asteroid were found to be made up of heavy metals and dense rocky matter such as granite, exploding such an object would only expand the impact area and quantity of impacts from asteroid material. Rocky metal filled meteorites are the most prevalent form of objects to make it through the atmosphere to Earth's surface. It would be far better to attempt to push an object like that "way off course" with one, or several, sideways blasts. The object being not to break it up into small chunks, rather to move it from its present trajectory to a safer one (for Earth). This kind of push requires a different kind of force than a bomb blast. The optimum force would be one which produced massive thrust over a long period, and not some sudden impact. However, I do not think that we have such a device within our current inventory. Furthermore, the size of such a required device would have to be determined by the mass of the incoming object. Complications to this idea are apparent in thinking about the object spinning or tumbling along its path toward Earth. HOW would you hit the center of mass from the side and produce a constant thrust to the right (for example) if the object is already tumbling rapidly. The tumbling motion means that the thrust will be dissapated in random directions as the object tumbles erraticly on its flight path. Earlier thinkers who considered this problem have suggested detonation of a series of bombs along (for example) the right side of the object giving a repeated series of shoves from the right side totally independent of the attitude of the tumbling object. Wow... this now becomes a very intricate mission, and it must take place far enough out in space to prevent the Earth's gravity from becoming the predominant factor in flight path determination. Given the speed of normal asteroids at over 90,000 Miles Per Hour, we also must consider an asteriod as a difficult target to hit regardless of the type of bullet we fire at it.

Answer 4

Destroy asteroids? Probably not, unless they're very small. the more likely strategy would be to use rockets (or nuclear weapons) to nudge an asteroid off of a collision course with earth. In any case, we would have tremendous difficulty nudging a large asteroid out of the path.

The other problem with nuclear weapons to destroy asteroids is that in doing so, we would likely fragment the asteroid, which then, instead of having a single problematic projectile, we might have dozens...not good.

So I would say, no, the more likely strategy is to nudge asteroids out of the way with some sort of rocket system.

Answer 5

its a matter of size...

an asteroid the size of a mountain you could influence with a bomb, perhaps destroy it. What about an asteroid the size of Texas?

Not that I condone or suggest dropping nuclear bombs on Texas to test out my theory, but if we did (yeah! make it GLOW!), I really think you would just have an asteroid with a few more craters on it.

Best advice I can give you is- buckle your seat belt. Why? Because dying in a car wreck is fairly likely... an asteroid collision? REALLY unlikely.

Answer 6

its been proposed. but theres a problem. any asteroid thats big enough to cause us damage is way to be be completely annihilated by a nuclear missile. instead you would get several large pieces. the missile wouldnt shatter it into billions of small pieces, it would crack it into 2,3,4, maybe 5 large pieces. those pieces could impact several places instead of just one, causing more damage.

its more likely that we will use several smaller controlled blasts to knock it off course.

and what collision course are u talking about? because no asteroids are going to hit us within at least about 40 years. if your talking about apophis then your listening to old information. its been downgraded to a 0 on the Toronto scale, which means there is no chance at all that it will hit us. were not on a collision course with any asteroids at the moment.

Answer 7

using nuclear weopons is not the best option, it's the laziest and dumbest one. given the unpredictability of the outcome of such blast. why not use our brain power and present technological advancement to find a solution that's gonna work with or without nuclear weopons.
one such proposal was to attached propulsion device that could deflect a small asteroid off course.
for big asteroids however, we could gather all the greedy miners and capitalists in the world, fly them in to the asteroid and let them recklessly mine the asteroid, suck em dry, just like what they have been doing to our planet earth, until the asteroid vanishes.