Makes me wonder how much longer the earth has before it is destroyed.

Their idea that a spacecraft could simply use the gravitational attraction between itself and the asteroid is science fiction.

If one was detected today,we would have no other choise but to fire nukes at it and hope for the best.

Nukes wont work for certain types of asteroids... No matter how much you hope it will work.

Up until 50 years ago, we would have been totally defenseless against one.
With the advent of nuclear weapons, we might have the possiblity of lauching ICBM nuclear tipped rockets at it, in an attempt to destroy it. Im not the only one that hopes that would work.

What Im saying is,thats all we got today.

However, doing such could result in creating a worse situation for ourselves. If we broke it into peices, the damage from multiple impacts could be just as bad as one big one.

+ the asteroid becomes radioactive.

The Earth moves in space the equivalent of its own diameter in just six minutes. So to move an Earth-bound asteroid off target, it would be enough to delay its arrival time by six minutes, allowing it to harmlessly sweep past.

The idea of detonating a nuke near the surface of an asteroid is for the purpose of heating one side and vaporizing some of the surface. This creates "thrust" on one side for as long as it remains hotter than the rest of the body and can gently reduce the asteroids speed.

actually it is said to expolde in the statoshpere so there oxygen to blast the astroid out of line of major damage but what i don't get is why everyone thinks 1 gigantic asteriod will destroy the earth by my calculation it would take 1 the size of the moon to do that

Actually,a 1.2 miles wide asteroid is giving it enough kinetic energy to be a doomsday asteroid. This asteroid would be large enough to wipe out most of mankind.

And to wait until the astroid is in the EA is not a good idea,the earlier we can go to work on it the better.
And the effect of a nuke blastwave in vacum-I suspect that it would have to do with the vaporization (already mentioned by DEBUNKER) of the material of the asteroid closest to the blast, using a portion of the asteroid's own mass as "reaction mass" as it rapidly expands away from the underlying surface. Under the intense energy of a nuke, the vaporization would, almost by definition, be very fast.

But not much of a blast wave, to be fair. In space the blast wave is made up only of the superheated components of the original bomb, whereas in an atmosphere a large volume of air is flash heated, which creates a compact overpressure wave that propagates at sound-speed and is responsible for much of the immediate destruction surrounding an atomic bomb explosion.


I wish we could experiment with blowing up asteroids. It would a good way of getting rid of the weapons, after all we've plenty to spare. Plus we would learn alot about asteroids and how to deflect them.

Of course you remember Tempel 1.

http://www.space.com/deepimpact/