14 DAY TRIAL // At the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) meeting, held at the Stanford University on February 6, researcher Bong Wie, from the Iowa State University, said that atomic bombs can be used to avert any potential asteroid threat, even if we only get one week of advance warning.
The expert told attendants that our existing nuclear arsenal is overkill for handling any potentially-dangerous asteroid. A single atomic weapon will most likely be enough to either change the trajectory of a space rock, or destroy it outright, Space reports. This argument comes nearly a year after the city of Chelyabinsk, in Russia, was struck by a 19-meter (65-foot) asteroid.
The explosion injured around 1,500 people, but the worst part of it was that no one saw the space rock coming. Our early warning systems proved to be simply too stretched out across the sky to be able to effectively identify a potential threat before it hits. Wie said that atomic weapons would only work if we have at least a couple of days of early warning.
Wie's two-step approach to destroying asteroids involves using an impactor to create a crater in any space rock. The impactor would be followed less than a second later by an atomic device. By detonating the latter in a crater, its effectiveness would increase by a factor of 20, the expert said.