Thanks everyone for answering
In: 9
The idea that ‘you cannot nuke an asteroid’ is a popular misconception. Many people seem to think that nuking an asteroid would break it apart without changing its trajectory, but this is only true if you spot the asteroid *extremely* late. In most cases, a nuclear blast would alter the asteroids orbit, so that neither it, nor the debris from the explosion, would come anywhere near the earth. This works better the more time you have.
In movies like Armageddon, they only have 18 days before impact, so in this scenario, a nuke might not work. This is incredibly unlikely to happen in real life however. We track asteroids in the solar system quite well, and we’d likely have many years, if not decades or even centuries of warning. If you can nudge the vector of an asteroid by just 1 mph, that would result in a deflection of over 80,000 miles after a decade – far larger than the diameter of the earth, so well enough to prevent it from hitting us.
Latest Answers