4 ms·

That'll just make more debris spread out over a larger area. Things don't literally get vaporized, unless you're talking megaton nuclear explosions.

saiya-jin 5y ago
Also, if the cloud is now 40km big and growing as I read someplace else, the all-vaporizing fireball would have to be ridiculous, much stronger than Tsar bomb and probably blast a massive hole in our atmosphere and all outer layers. A properly bad idea.
GistNoesis 5y ago
Nukes would definitely do the trick (it's impressive how strong they are compared to traditional explosives), but it's probably a bad idea because of some treaty about their usage in space. On earth, I did some quick calculations (maybe I'm wrong), energy of vaporization of 1kg of steel, (heating solid steel at 20C to 1500C melting point then melting it then raising to 2860C then boiling it) => 8x10^6 J/kg = energy equivalent of 2kg TNT/kg of steel. I don't know how big was the thing they destroyed but they would just need to have a bomb twice as big as the thing they are trying to destroy. (But with explosives the bottleneck is probably heating the thing sufficiently fast before it disperse). In space it's probably even more favorable, because like water boiling in vacuum at room temperature, the phase diagram of iron https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Pure_iron_phase_diagram_%28EN%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Pure_iro... mean that to vaporize it you just have to melt it to a liquid at 1500C (attach lot of thermite to it to make a giant ball of melted thing) then disperse it violently to use the vacuum of space to vaporize it. There are maybe also ways to reuse the kinetic energy of the satellite in motion to help vaporize it.
- anshumankmr 5y ago
  Strapping a nuke to a large rocket storing tonnes of highly flammable rocket fuel is a recipe for disaster. And the radiation it would release would quite possibly interfere with the Van Allen belt and that would cause issues with satellites.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    As impressive as nukes are, they're nothing compared to the energy of the van allen belt.

saiya-jin 5y ago

Also, if the cloud is now 40km big and growing as I read someplace else, the all-vaporizing fireball would have to be ridiculous, much stronger than Tsar bomb and probably blast a massive hole in our atmosphere and all outer layers. A properly bad idea.

GistNoesis 5y ago

Nukes would definitely do the trick (it's impressive how strong they are compared to traditional explosives), but it's probably a bad idea because of some treaty about their usage in space. On earth, I did some quick calculations (maybe I'm wrong), energy of vaporization of 1kg of steel, (heating solid steel at 20C to 1500C melting point then melting it then raising to 2860C then boiling it) => 8x10^6 J/kg = energy equivalent of 2kg TNT/kg of steel. I don't know how big was the thing they destroyed but they would just need to have a bomb twice as big as the thing they are trying to destroy. (But with explosives the bottleneck is probably heating the thing sufficiently fast before it disperse). In space it's probably even more favorable, because like water boiling in vacuum at room temperature, the phase diagram of iron https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Pure_iron_phase_diagram_%28EN%29.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Pure_iro... mean that to vaporize it you just have to melt it to a liquid at 1500C (attach lot of thermite to it to make a giant ball of melted thing) then disperse it violently to use the vacuum of space to vaporize it. There are maybe also ways to reuse the kinetic energy of the satellite in motion to help vaporize it.

anshumankmr 5y ago
Strapping a nuke to a large rocket storing tonnes of highly flammable rocket fuel is a recipe for disaster. And the radiation it would release would quite possibly interfere with the Van Allen belt and that would cause issues with satellites.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  As impressive as nukes are, they're nothing compared to the energy of the van allen belt.