LIVERMORE (CBS SF) – Sounds like a scene from a Hollywood sci-fi thriller, but researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab have joined a team of Air Force technologists to test whether a nuclear explosion could be used around a world-threatening asteroid.
Whether it’s Bruce Willis and his oil drill crew attacking an asteroid as it approaches Earth in ‘Armageddon’ or Tia Leoni and her father waiting for a massive tidal wave from an asteroid strike in ‘Deep Impact,’ Hollywood is captivated. by the threat from space.
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Lansing Horan IV, a member of the team, said the research focused on the neutron radiation from a nuclear blast, because neutrons can be more penetrating than X-rays.
“This means that a neutron yield can potentially heat larger amounts of asteroid surface material and is therefore more effective at deflecting asteroids than an X-ray yield,” he said.
Horan said there are two basic options for defeating an asteroid: disturbance or deflection.
Disturbance is the approach of transferring so much energy to the asteroid that it is forcefully shattered into many fragments moving at extreme speeds.
“Previous work showed that more than 99.5 percent of the original asteroid’s mass would miss Earth,” he said. “This disturbance path would probably be considered if the warning time before an asteroid impact is short and / or the asteroid is relatively small.”
Deflection is the gentler approach in which a smaller amount of energy is transferred to the asteroid, the object remains intact, and it is pushed into a slightly different orbit at a slightly different speed.
“Over time, with many years leading up to the collision, even a tiny change in speed could lead to a distance that Earth misses,” Horan said. “Deflection may generally be preferable as the safer and more ‘elegant’ option, if we have enough warning time to run these types of responses. That’s why our work focused on deflection. “
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Horan said the work was a small step forward for nuclear deflection simulations.
“An ultimate goal would be to determine the optimal neutron energy spectrum, the diffusion of neutron energy outputs that deposit their energy in the most ideal way to maximize the resulting rate change or deflection,” he said.
Horan said the research has shown that precision and accuracy in the energy deposition data is important.
“If the energy deposition input is not correct, we should not have much confidence in the asteroid deflection output,” he said. “We now know that the energy deposition profile is most important for high yields that would be used to deflect large asteroids.”
He said that if there were to be a plan to mitigate a large incoming asteroid, the spatial profile of the energy deposition should be taken into account to correctly model the asteroid’s expected speed change.
“On the other hand, energy link efficiency is always important to consider, even for low yields against small asteroids,” he said. “We found that the magnitude of the energy deposition is the factor that most strongly predicts the overall deflection of the asteroid, affecting the final velocity change more than the spatial distribution.”
Before planning an asteroid mitigation mission, it will be necessary to take these energy parameters into account in order to have the correct simulations and expectations.
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“It is important that we further explore and understand all asteroid mitigation technologies to maximize the tools in our toolkit,” Horan said. “In certain scenarios, using a nuclear device to deflect an asteroid would have several advantages over non-nuclear alternatives. If the warning time is short and / or the incident asteroid is large, a nuclear explosive may be our only practical option for deflection and / or disturbance. “