It’s a favorite theme of disaster movies, but nuking a looming asteroid in the real world has been touted as a catastrophe. That’s a very bad idea.
A nuclear bomb can destroy a small asteroid, but nuking a larger asteroid will only shatter it into pieces. Those debris still threaten our planet, and perhaps even make the situation worse. It has multiple impacts across the planet.
But is using nuclear weapons against an approaching asteroid really a bad idea? With the right technology, a nuclear explosion could be used as an asteroid deflector.
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have now created a modeling tool that can simulate what would happen if a nuclear explosive device were detonated on the surface of an asteroid. This tool will help improve our understanding of how radiation from a nuclear explosion interacts with the asteroid’s surface, and can also examine the dynamics of shock waves that can affect the asteroid’s interior. can.
An explosive technique called nuclear ablation. The explosion’s radiation vaporizes part of the asteroid’s surface, producing explosive thrust and a corresponding change in velocity.
The model can incorporate a wide range of initial conditions to simulate the kinds of asteroids we have recently been able to study up close, from solid rocks to piles of rubble. These simulations are giving planetary scientists more insight and more options about the likelihood that space rocks will someday rain down on Earth.
“With enough warning time, it could be possible to launch a nuclear device and send it into an asteroid millions of miles away toward Earth.” LLNL researcher Mary Barkey said:.
“The device can then be detonated, redirecting the asteroid and moving it away from Earth with controlled pressure while keeping it intact, or destroying the asteroid and breaking it into small, fast-moving pieces, which can lead to a planetary planet.” There is a possibility of a collision.”
Thanks to the Dual Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which intentionally crashes a kinetic impactor into an asteroid to change its orbit, scientists have learned a lot about what it takes to redirect a dangerous asteroid. The new model, called the X-ray Energy Storage Model, will explore tools to build on insights gained from DART while studying whether nuclear ablation can be a viable alternative to kinetic impact missions. provided to the person.
Burkey said in an article: LLNL press release Nuclear devices have the highest ratio of energy density per unit mass of any human technology and could be an invaluable tool in mitigating the asteroid threat.
However, as the team writes, In their paper published in Planetary Science Journal, “Predicting the effectiveness of potential nuclear deflection or destruction missions will depend on accurate multiphysics simulations of the instrument’s X-ray energy deposition on the asteroid and the resulting ablation of material.”
The research team said the physics involved in these simulations required a variety of complex physics packages, which spanned orders of magnitude and were extremely computationally intensive. Varkey and colleagues set the goal of developing an efficient and accurate method to model the nuclear deflection of various physical properties of asteroids.
Barkey said their high-fidelity simulations can track photons as they penetrate the surface of asteroid-like materials such as rock, iron and ice, while accounting for more complex processes such as re-radiation.
The model also takes into account various asteroid bodies. They said this comprehensive approach allows the model to be applied to a wide range of potential asteroid scenarios.
Megan Brooke Shull, Planetary Defense Project Leader at LLNL, provides decision makers with actionable risk information that can prevent asteroid strikes and protect critical infrastructure in the event of an actual planetary defense emergency. He stated that this high-fidelity simulation modeling will be important. He explained that it would save lives.
“Although the probability of a large asteroid impacting us in our lifetime is low, the potential impact could be devastating,” Brooke Shull said.
This article was first published today’s universe.read Original work.