NASA scientists say that if a dangerous asteroid appears to be headed directly towards Earth, one option would be to send a spacecraft out to destroy it with a nuclear warhead, reminiscent of the popular 1998 movie, "Armageddon."
A mission where NASA would actively seek out an asteroid to nuke it would cost about $1 billion and could be developed from work NASA is already funding, according to Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, the Cleveland Leader notes.
The vehicle required for such an ambitious mission, 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 would be to break the asteroid into as many pieces as possible, which would cause them to scatter along separate trajectories. Wie believes that up to 99 percent or more of the asteroid pieces could end up missing the Earth, greatly limiting the impact on the planet. Out of the pieces that could reach Earth, many would burn up in the atmosphere and offer no threat.
Wie referenced a Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle (HAIV) mission architecture that blends a hypervelocity kinetic impactor with a subsurface nuclear explosion for optimal fragmentation and dispersion of near-Earth objects is already in place.
