4 ms·
Wouldn't nuke going off just next to it nudge anything enough off course to not have to worry about composition? Or Hollywood yet again inserted a very unrealis
by saiya-jin 4y ago
Wouldn't nuke going off just next to it nudge anything enough off course to not have to worry about composition? Or Hollywood yet again inserted a very unrealistic picture of how things work in my head.
Or we strictly prefer not sending nukes up there outside WWIII scenario. But then plenty of satellites have/had nuclear fuel as main source of energy, just not critical mass for anything BAM, just nasty dispersion in the upper atmosphere threat.
- XorNot 4y agoA nuke going off "near" anything in space will do very little damage - there's no shockwave propagation, so all you have is the bombs heat - which at least half gets wasted on empty space. One of of the big problems with nuking asteroids is, as in this case, if it's a rubble pile then it can be considerably difficult to get enough physical contact with it to even meaningfully effect it. Hence the reason for DART: we've got an impressive something but the question is did we even successfully deflect the trajectory of the bulk of the material?
- ncmncm 4y agoA lot of smallish bolides could be much worse than one big one. Particularly if the big one would miss, but many of the saller ones don't.