Best Way to Deal With a Threatening Asteroid? Nuke It, Says Scientist

Turns out, Michael Bay may have been right when it comes to the best way to destroy an asteroid that poses a threat to humanity, according to Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University.

When speaking at the International Space Development in La Jolla, Calif., Wie described a process by which a nuclear warhead would be sent to destroy an asteroid set on collision course with Earth – a scenario described in the 1998 movie “Armageddon.”

The mission, which Wie estimates would cost some $1 billion, could be developed from work that NASA is already working on, Cleveland Leader reports the scientist as saying at the event.

The needed vehicle, Wie said, would have two sections that would separate before arriving. One would then be responsible for blasting a hole into the space rock, with the other planting the warhead deep inside it.

The goal of the mission would be to fragment the asteroid into smaller pieces that would then follow separate trajectories, 99 percent of which would circumvent Earth completely with many of the remainder burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Ultimately, none of the pieces to make it Earth would pose a threat.

In order to ensure the safety of the planet, Wie said he recommends having two space crafts capable of carrying out the mission should one of them fail, both of which would be designed to launch on Delta 4 rockets.

In terms of technology that already exists, Wie pointed to NASA’s Deep Impact space craft that sent a kinetic impactor to collide with Comet Temple 1 in 2005. It was then followed by a Centaur upper stage crashing into the moon during the LCROSS mission four years later.

Finally, Wie reported, a Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) mission achitecture that blends a hypervelocity kinetic impactor with a subsurface nuclear explosion for optimal fragmentation and dispersion of near-Earth objects is already in place.