Experiment shows that a nuclear explosion could save the planet from a deadly asteroid impact
The X-rays emitted by a nuclear blast could deflect asteroids as they approach Earth, a new study suggests.A blast of X-rays from a nuclear explosion should be enough to save Earth from an incoming asteroid, according to the results of a first-of-its-kind experiment., “showed some really amazing direct experimental evidence for how effective this technique can be”, says Dawn Graninger, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The team used Sandia’s vast Z machine, which uses magnetic fields to produce high temperatures and powerful X-rays, to fire X-rays at two mock asteroids about the size of coffee beans. “About 80 trillion watts of electricity flow through the machine at about 100 billionths of a second,” says Moore. “That intense electrical surge compresses argon gas into a very hot plasma millions of degrees in temperature, and that emits a bubble of X-rays.
Moore says the results show that the technique could be scaled up to much larger asteroids, as big as around 4 kilometres in diameter, to push them away from a collision course with Earth. “In particular, we’re interested in the largest asteroids with a short warning time,” he says. Where these are concerned, other approaches, such as ramming a spacecraft into an asteroid — as— “might not have enough energy to knock it off course”.
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