NASA is already funding research on asteroid defense, but if a dangerous object really was barreling towards Earth they could opt to send a spacecraft carrying a nuclear warhead to destroy it, science.com reported.
An asteroid-destruction mission would most likely cost about $1 billion, and could be developed through NASA's asteroid defense work.
Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University is working with a team on a new system that could protect Earth from dangerous asteroids.
According to Wie an anti-asteroid craft would be sent to the object with a nuclear warhead to destroy the threat. The spacecraft would consist of two sections The kinetic energy impactor section would separate from the craft when it arrived at the asteroid and blast a crater in it. The other half would carry the warhead, which would explode inside the crater upon impact.
Watch:
The system would be able to respond to asteroid threats with as little notice as one year. Wie said the plan would be to have two crafts on standby: one would be for backup. If one of the crafts failed to launch or wasn't successful in destroying the asteroid the other one could take over.
Wie claimed sending nuclear weapons to space could cause controversy, but a nuclear weapon is the only conceivably way to destroy an asteroid on short notice. There are other methods of protecting Earth from threatening space objects, but those would require us to prepare for them 10 to 20 years in advance.
There are a number of safety features that could be used to ensure minimal damage to surrounding objects and keep the warhead from detonating if the craft fails to launch.
This technology has already been tested in flight. NASA sent a kinetic impactor to collide with Comet Tempel 1 in 2005. In 2009 they crashed a similar craft into the moon during the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission. A sub-satellite photographed the impact.
