Dangerous Near Earth Asteroids: Is Nuking them the Best Protection?

Recent Russian space rock explosion and same day close flyby of an asteroid is stirring up talk about dealing with the near-Earth object threat.

CREDIT: Texas A&M

If a dangerous asteroid appears to be on a collision course for Earth, one option is to send a spacecraft to destroy it with a nuclear warhead.

Such a mission, which would cost about $1 billion, could be developed from work NASA is already funding, a prominent asteroid defense expert says.

Bong Wie, director of the Asteroid Deflection Research Center at Iowa State University, described the system his team is developing to attendees at the International Space Development Conference in La Jolla, Calif., on May 23.

The annual National Space Society gathering attracted hundreds from the space industry around the world.

An anti-asteroid spacecraft would deliver a nuclear warhead to destroy an incoming threat before it could reach Earth, Wie said.

The two-section spacecraft would consist of a kinetic energy impactor that would separate before arrival and blast a crater in the asteroid.

The other half of the spacecraft would carry the nuclear weapon, which would then explode inside the crater after the vehicle impacted.

The goal would be to fragment the asteroid into many pieces, which would then disperse along separate trajectories.

Bong Wie

Bong 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.

Of those that do reach our world, many would burn up in the atmosphere and pose no threat.

Wie's study has focused on providing the capability to respond to a threatening asteroid on short notices of a year or so.

The plan would be to have two spacecraft on standby — one primary, the other backup — that could be launched on Delta 4 rockets.

If the first spacecraft failed on launch or didn't fragment the asteroid, the second would be sent aloft to finish the job.

Wie admitted that sending nuclear weapons into space would be politically controversial.

However, he said there are a number of safety features that could be built into the spacecraft to prevent the nuclear warhead from detonating in the event of a launch failure.

A nuclear weapon is the only thing that would work against an asteroid on short notice, Wie added.

Other systems designed to divert an asteroid such as tugboats, gravity tractors, solar sails and mass drivers would require 10 or 20 years of advance notice.