A quite chilling study has revealed that NASA may truly not be able to do anything about an enormous asteroid that might literally smash into our planet in 2135. No, this is not a joke.
This asteroid is called Bennu and it is easily as big as the Empire State Building. If it were to meer Earth the effects would, without doubt, be quite devastating. While there has been a lot of talk about launching a rocket in order to knock the asteroid itself off of its current path but nothing is set in stone just yet.
NASA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have actually been investigating this concept itself for quite some time. Basically, they want to build a 30-foot-tall, 8.8-ton spacecraft that would act as an asteroid battering ram. A paper was actually published on this in the journal Acta Astronautica that evaluates the options for using the spacecraft to successfully redirect Bennu.
The issue with using a spacecraft to ‘nudge’ the asteroid is that it needs to be gentle so that it does not break any of the asteroid off, this whole process in itself is quite complicated. That being said out of all the scenarios covered it does not seem like this ‘nudge’ is the best option at all.
The lab actually noted as follows on their website:
The findings suggest that the nuclear option may be required with larger objects like Bennu. The nuclear approach carries the potential to deposit much more energy into an object like Bennu, causing a greater change in speed and trajectory.
Unlike popular portrayals of a nuclear deflection mission – like the movie “Armageddon” – the nuclear deflection approach would consist of detonating a nuclear explosive some distance from the asteroid. This would flood one side of the asteroid with X-rays, vaporizing a layer of the surface, which would create rocket-like propulsion as vaporized material is ejected from the object. Unlike a kinetic impactor, the amount of energy deposited into an asteroid with a nuclear device could be tuned by adjusting how far it is from the asteroid when detonated.
Because Bennu regularly passes close enough to Earth for radar observations, researchers are able to estimate its orbit with enough accuracy to give a few decades warning, if it’s bound to impact the Earth. This near-Earth Bennu fly-by happens every six years. But for other objects that do not regularly pass close enough to Earth for radar observations, much more uncertainty exists. If limited to telescopic observations, it’s possible that researchers may not be 100 percent certain of an impact until less than a year before a collision. In a scenario where there is too little time to mount an effective deflection mission, the last option may be robust disruption via nuclear explosive, though the window of opportunity would be very tight. A robust disruption scenario would envision breaking the asteroid into a number of smaller pieces.
“Successful disruption requires ensuring that the asteroid pieces are sufficiently small and well-dispersed so that they pose a much-reduced threat to the Earth,” Syal said. “Disruption carried out as late as tens of days before impact can still be very effective in reducing the total damage felt by Earth. Previous work by our research group has shown that the impacting debris is reduced to less than 1 percent of its initial mass by disrupting the asteroid, even at these late times.”
Regardless, this shows that we are quite vulnerable much more vulnerable than we should be. No one knows for sure how we will overcome the threat this asteroid and others like it pose but luckily we have quite some time to figure out how to deal with Bennu. For more information on this please feel free to check out the video below.
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