NASA unveils shocking plans to nuke a massive asteroid

NASA is exploring experimenting with the "Hammer," which would either ram the asteroid out of the path of Earth or nuke it.

NASA is examining a new weapon that could be used to stop an asteroid speeding toward Earth, and its deploymen twould be quite the epic sight. Basically, scientists think they might be able to actually nuke a huge rock in outer space and knock it out of its potentially humanity-ending trajectory.

NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration are calling it the Hammer, which stands for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response. It would be a 30-foot-tall shuttle that could act as a batteirng ram or carry an atomic bomb.

NASA has its eye on Bennu, a gigantic asteroid that has just a 1 in 2,700 shot of hitting the Earth in 2135, but still an uncomfortably high number. And considering the fact that every extinction event known to us on Earth was caused by an asteroid hitting the planet, it seems prudent to expect that eventually we will be once again hit with an asteroid at some point, even if it may be many thousands or perhaps millions of years in the future.

Bennu is a very big rock, stretching approximately 1,614 feet in diameter, or almost a third of a mile. It was discovered in 1999 and is the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission, which will seek to obtain samples of the asteroid in 2023. If it struck the Earth, it would release 80,000 times the power of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

“HAMMER (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response) is a nuclear spacecraft (8 tonnes) planned by NASA, capable of blowing up an asteroid, if it was on course to wipe out life on Earth,” reads a Wikipedia excerpt. “It is a collaboration between the National Nuclear Security Administration, NASA, and two Energy Department weapons labs.”

The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia on Bennu.

101955 Bennu (provisional designation 1999 RQ36)[10] is a carbonaceous asteroid in the Apollo group discovered by the LINEAR Project on September 11, 1999. It is a potentially hazardous object that is listed on the Sentry Risk Table with the third-highest rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale, due to a cumulative 1-in-2,700 chance of impacting Earth in the late 22nd century. It is the planned target of the OSIRIS-REx mission which is intended to return samples to Earth in 2023 for further study.

101955 Bennu has a mean diameter of approximately 492 m (1,614 ft; 0.306 mi) and has been observed extensively with the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar and the Goldstone Deep Space Network.

On average, an asteroid with a diameter of 500 m (1,600 ft; 0.31 mi) can be expected to impact Earth about every 130,000 years or so.[22] A 2010 dynamical study by Andrea Milani and collaborators predicted a series of eight potential Earth impacts by Bennu between 2169 and 2199. The cumulative probability of impact is dependent on physical properties of Bennu that were poorly known at the time, but was not found to exceed 0.071% for all eight encounters.[23] The authors recognized that an accurate assessment of 101955 Bennu’s probability of Earth impact would require a detailed shape model and additional observations (either from the ground or from spacecraft visiting the object) to determine the magnitude and direction of the Yarkovsky effect.

The publication of the shape model and of astrometry based on radar observations obtained in 1999, 2005, and 2011,[1] made possible an improved estimate of the Yarkovsky acceleration and a revised assessment of the impact probability. The current (as of 2014) best estimate of the impact probability is a cumulative probability of 0.037% in the interval 2175 to 2196.[6] This corresponds to a cumulative score on the Palermo scale of −1.71. If an impact were to occur, the expected kinetic energy associated with the collision would be 1200 megatons in TNT equivalent.

Lauretta et al. reported in 2015 their results of a computer simulation, concluding that it is more likely that 101955 Bennu will be destroyed by some other cause:

The orbit of Bennu is intrinsically dynamically unstable, as are those of all NEOs. In order to glean probabilistic insights into the future evolution and likely fate of Bennu beyond a few hundred years, we tracked 1000 virtual “Bennus” for an interval of 300 Myr with the gravitational perturbations of the planets Mercury–Neptune included. Our results … indicate that Bennu has a 48% chance of falling into the Sun. There is a 10% probability that Bennu will be ejected out of the inner Solar System, most likely after a close encounter with Jupiter. The highest impact probability for a planet is with Venus (26%), followed by the Earth (10%) and Mercury (3%). The odds of Bennu striking Mars are only 0.8% and there is a 0.2% chance that Bennu will eventually collide with Jupiter.

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