A
huge asteroid is hurtling towards Earth at devastating speed, and the space
agency intends to save the planet by blowing it up with a nuclear warhead, the
Daily Star is reporting. However, it will be over a century before the whole
situation plays out. NASA Is Going To Nuke Asteroids!
It
may sound like the premise of a terrible summer sci-fi movie, but this is real:
NASA has genuinely spotted an asteroid, lovingly named 101955 Bennu, and
determined that its size, speed, and orbit put it on a potential collision
course with Earth. And they genuinely plan to steer it away from danger with
the use of nuclear weapons.
Fortunately,
they’ll have about a century to work out the entire math, considering that none
of this is expected to go down before 2135 — September 21, 2135, to be
specific.
Here’s
what we know: Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid that we’ve known about since
1999. It’s estimated to be about 1,600 feet in diameter (the size of a village,
according to the Star) and weighs about 87 million tons. It’s hurtling through
space at about 63,000 miles per hour, according to Buzzfeed.
And
on that fateful day in 2135, there is a one in 2,700 chance that it will hit
us. If that happens, the results will be catastrophic.
For
NASA, those odds are not good. MIT impact expert Richard Binzel told Buzzfeed
that this is something that needs to be taken seriously — and is being taken
seriously.
“Smart
people are taking this seriously and thinking carefully about what might be
done.”
So
what’s the plan? Nukes, of course.
Specifically,
the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER)
program has a couple of plans in the works, both involving nuclear warheads.
One would be to simply blow the thing to smithereens, but that carries the risk
of simply scattering the asteroid’s debris over a wider area.
A
more sensible option involves using nukes to deflect the asteroid away — if it
can be pulled off, that is. David Dearborn, of the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, says that it’s theoretically possible to nudge the space rock out
of the way with nukes.
“If
the asteroid is small enough, and we detect it early enough, we can do it with
the impactor. The impactor is not as flexible as the nuclear option when we
really want to change the speed of the body in a hurry.”
Officials
weren’t keen to give an estimate of the cost of such a plan. However, by way of
comparison, Buzzfeed notes that a current scientific mission, the OSIRIS-REx
mission, is headed toward Bennu right now, for study. That mission came with a
price tag of $800 million.
Fortunately,
the space agency has a solid century and some change before raising money for
saving the world becomes critical.
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