LIVERMORE (CBS SF) – Sounds like a scene from a Hollywood science fiction thriller, but researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have teamed up with a team of Air Force technologists to see if a nuclear explosion could be used to divert a terrain that endangers asteroid.
Whether it’s Bruce Willis and his crew of oil drills taking an asteroid as it approaches Earth at “Armageddon” or Tia Leoni and her father expecting a massive tidal wave from a asteroid strike in “Deep Impact”, Hollywood has been fascinated by the threat of space.
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Lansing Horan IV, a member of the team, said the research focused on neutron radiation from a nuclear detonation, as neutrons can be more penetrating than X-rays.
“This means that a neutron performance can heat larger amounts of asteroid surface material and therefore be more effective at deflecting asteroids than an X-ray performance,” he said.
Horan said there are two basic options for defeating an asteroid: disruption or deflection.
Disruption is the approach of imparting so much energy to the asteroid that it breaks robustly into many fragments that move at extreme speeds.
“Previous work found that more than 99.5 percent of the mass of the original asteroid would be missing from Earth,” he said. “This path of disruption would probably be considered if the warning time before an asteroid impact is short and / or the asteroid is relatively small.”
Deflection is the smoothest approach that involves imparting less energy to the asteroid, keeping the object intact, and pushing it into a slightly different orbit at a slightly modified speed.
“Over time, many years before the impact, even a minimal gear change could add up to a missing distance on Earth,” Horan said. Generally, deflection may be preferred as the safest and “smartest” option, if we have enough notice time to adopt this type of response. That’s why our work focused on deviation. ”
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Horan said the work was a small step forward for nuclear deflection simulations.
“One of the ultimate goals would be to determine the optimal neutron energy spectrum, the diffusion of the energy outputs of the neutrons that deposit their energies in the most ideal way to maximize the resulting change in velocity or deflection,” he said. to say.
Horan said the research showed that accuracy and precision in energy deposition data are important.
“If the energy deposition input is incorrect, we shouldn’t have much confidence in the asteroid deflection output,” he said. “We now know that the energy deposition profile is most important for large yields that would be used to deflect large asteroids.”
He said that if there was a plan to mitigate a large incoming asteroid, the spatial profile of energy deposition should be taken into account to properly model the expected change in speed of the asteroid.
“On the other hand, the efficiency of energy coupling is always important to consider, even for low yields against small asteroids,” he said. “We have found that the magnitude of energy deposition is the factor that most strongly predicts the general deflection of the asteroid, which influences the final velocity change more than the spatial distribution.”
To plan an asteroid mitigation mission, these energy parameters will need to be considered in order to have correct simulations and expectations.
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“It is important that we continue to research and understand all asteroid mitigation technologies in order to maximize the tools in our toolkit,” Horan said. “In certain scenarios, the use of a nuclear device to deflect an asteroid would have several advantages over non-nuclear alternatives. In fact, if the warning time is short and / or the incident asteroid is large, an explosive nuclear power could be our only practical option for diversion and / or disruption. “