LIVERMORE (CBS SF) – It looks like a scene from a Hollywood SF thriller, but researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have joined a team of Air Force technologists to test whether a nuclear explosion could be used to deflect an asteroid terrestrial threat.
Whether it’s Bruce Willis and his crew of oil drills taking an asteroid as it approaches Earth in “Armageddon,” or Tia Leoni and her father, waiting for a massive tidal wave from an asteroid strike in “Deep Impact”, Hollywood was fascinated by the threat from space.
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Lansing Horan IV, a member of the team, said the research focused on neutron radiation from a nuclear detonation because neutrons can be more penetrating than X-rays.
“This means that a neutron efficiency can heat larger amounts of asteroid surface material and therefore be more efficient at deflecting asteroids than an X-ray efficiency,” he said.
Horan said there are two basic options in defeating an asteroid: disruption or deflection.
The interruption is the approach of dividing so much energy into the asteroid that it is strongly broken into many fragments that move at extreme speeds.
“Previous work has found that over 99.5% of the asteroid’s original mass would miss Earth,” he said. “This perturbation path would probably be considered if the warning time before the impact of an asteroid is short and / or the asteroid is relatively short.”
Deflection is the gentler approach, which involves transmitting a smaller amount of energy to the asteroid, keeping the object intact and pushing it into a slightly different orbit at a slightly modified speed.
“Over time, many years before the impact, even a tiny change in speed could be added to a distance without Earth,” Horan said. Deviation could generally be preferred as a safer and more “elegant” option if we have enough warning time to promote this type of response. This is why our work has focused on deviation. ”
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Horan said the work was a small step forward for nuclear diversion simulations.
“A final goal would be to determine the optimal neutron energy spectrum, to spread the production of neutron energy that stores its energies in the most ideal way to maximize the resulting speed change or deviation,” he said.
Horan said the research showed that the accuracy and accuracy of energy deposition data are important.
“If the energy deposition input is incorrect, we should not have much confidence in the asteroid’s deflection output,” he said. “We now know that the energy deposition profile is most important for high yields that would be used to deflect large asteroids.”
He said that if there was to be a plan to attenuate a large asteroid, the space profile of the energy deposition should be taken into account to properly model the asteroid’s shifting speed.
“On the other hand, the efficiency of energy coupling is always important to consider, even for low efficiencies against small asteroids,” he said. “We found that the magnitude of energy deposition is the strongest predictor of the global deviation of the asteroid, influencing the change in final velocity more than the spatial distribution.”
To plan an asteroid attenuation mission, it will be necessary to take these energy parameters into account in order to have accurate simulations and expectations.
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“It’s important to continue researching and understanding all the asteroid attenuation technologies to maximize the tools in our toolkit,” Horan said. “In some scenarios, using a nuclear device to deflect an asteroid would have more advantages over non-nuclear alternatives. In fact, if the warning time is short and / or the incident asteroid is long, a nuclear explosive could be our only practical option for deflection and / or disturbance. ”