NASA must nuke doomsday asteroid to prevent catastrophe
NASA is mulling a bold nuclear strike on a massive asteroid hurtling toward Earth in a high-stakes attempt to prevent catastrophic damage.
After mulling several different solutions, scientists have devised an unconventional method to stop the “city killer” space rock from hitting the moon — by blowing it up with nukes.
Their unorthodox measure of preventing a potential lunar crash landing was detailed recently in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study published on the arXiv preprint server.
The team, which includes experts from NASA, wrote that “nuclear robust disruption missions” could be launched in as little as four years from now.
First discovered in December 2024, YR4 sparked worldwide concern that it could strike our planet on December 23, 2032, potentially generating enough power to destroy an entire city.
NASA’s Center for Near Earth Objects has since downgraded the likelihood of the space rock striking home to a negligible 0.00081 per cent chance, but upped the chances of it hitting the moon on that date to over 4 per cent.
If this were to happen, the cosmic collision could cause a cloud of shrapnel to impact Earth-orbiting satellites and spacecraft, while displaced matter could fall back to the moon, impeding rovers and even jeopardising astronauts with the Artemis program.
To prevent this a-rock-alyptic outcome, the researchers proposed a “kinetic disruption mission” in which the space rock is blown apart with “nuclear explosive devices” like the plot of the dystopian thriller “Armageddon.”
The team proposed dispatching two 100-kiloton nuclear devices capable of auto-piloting themselves to YR4 — which measures over 91m in length — and detonating with a force roughly five to eight times more powerful than the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, Futurism reported.
Meanwhile, a second explosive device would be kept “on-board in case it is needed,” per the researchers.
“Otherwise, it can be safely disposed of by detonating it in deep space after the asteroid is successfully deflected by the first one,” they wrote.
The team’s other proposed solution was a deflection mission like NASA’s 2022 Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), in which a spacecraft knocked an asteroid called Dimorphos off course by ramming it at high speed.
However, they ultimately ruled it out on the grounds that there would not be enough time to conduct reconnaissance on the size and mass of the object.
This would be an essential step before launching an interception op on the rock, which is 379 million miles away.
“Deflection missions were assessed and appear impractical,” scientists wrote.
Not to mention that a recon mission wouldn’t be able to launch until 2028, leaving defence systems only three years to intercept the threat.
By contrast, the team postulated that NASA could have anywhere from five to seven years to formulate the nuclear option, while the window for a launch ranges from 2029 to late 2031, Futurism reported.
Of course, we might not need to go to DEFCON four just yet — researchers reiterated that YR4 only has a slim chance of a lunar impact.
Nonetheless, this nuclear option presents yet another potential method of deflecting dangerous near-Earth space rocks in the future.
This story first appeared in the New York Post and was republished with permission.
Originally published as NASA must nuke doomsday asteroid to prevent catastrophe
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