LIVERMORE (CBS SF) – It sounds like a scene from a Hollywood sci-fi thriller, but researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, along with an Air Force team, tested technologists to test whether a nuclear explosion could be used to to give an earth-threatening distraction. asteroid.
Whether it’s Bruce Willis and his crew of oil rigs taking on an asteroid as it approaches Earth in ‘Armageddon’, or Tia Leoni and her father awaiting 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 was focused on the neutron radiation of a nuclear explosion, as neutrons can be more penetrating than X-rays.
“This means that a neutron yield could potentially heat larger amounts of asteroid surface material, and thus be more effective at deflecting asteroids than an X-ray yield,” he said.
Horan said there are two basic options for defeating an asteroid: disruption or deflection.
Disruption is the approach of giving so much energy to the asteroid that it breaks down strongly into many fragments moving at extreme speeds.
“In previous work, it was found that more than 99.5 percent of the mass of the original asteroid would miss the Earth,” he said. “This disruption path will probably be considered if the warning time before an asteroid impact is short and / or the asteroid is relatively small.”
Bending is the softer approach which involves transferring the smaller amount of energy to the asteroid, keeping the object intact and pushing it onto a slightly different orbit at a slightly different speed.
“Over time, with many years before the impact, even a small velocity change can miss a distance that the earth is missing,” Horan said. ‘Bending can generally be preferred as the safer and more’ elegant ‘option if we have sufficient warning time to set this type of response. This is why our work has focused on deflection. ”
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Horan said the work was a small step forward for nuclear deflection simulations.
“One ultimate goal is to determine the optimal neutron energy spectrum, the distribution of neutron energy outputs that deplete their energy in the most ideal way to maximize the resulting velocity change or deflection,” he said.
Horan said the research showed that precision and accuracy in the data on energy deposition are important.
“If the input of the energy deposit is wrong, we should not have much confidence in the delivery of the asteroid,” he said. “We now know that the energy deposition profile is the most important for large yields that will be used to deflect large asteroids.”
He said if there was a plan to mitigate a large incoming asteroid, the spatial energy deposition profile should be taken into account to model the expected asteroid velocity change correctly.
“On the other hand, energy connection efficiency is always important to consider, even for low yields against small asteroids,” he said. “We found that the magnitude of the precipitation of energy is the factor that most strongly predicts overall asteroid deflection, affecting the final velocity change more than the spatial distribution does.”
For planning an asteroid mitigation mission, it is necessary to take these energy parameters into account in order to have correct simulations and expectations.
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“It is important that we further explore and understand all asteroid mitigation technologies to maximize the tools in our toolkit,” Horan said. ‘In certain scenarios, using a nuclear device to deflect an asteroid may have several advantages over alternatives that are not for nuclear products. In fact, if the warning time is short and / or the incident asteroid is large, a nuclear explosive is our only practical option for bending and / or disruption. ‘