A 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

A 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?