You’ve likely heard by now that the movie Armageddon got it all wrong — it’s just not feasible to blow up an asteroid heading toward Earth with a bomb or few. But how unrealistic is it, really? New research set for publication March 15 in the planetary science journal Icarus is sending any hope humanity might have had to nuke an incoming asteroid threat even further into the realm of impossibility. Breaking up asteroids, it turns out, is really, really hard to do.
The new study was led by Charles El Mir, a researcher in Johns Hopkins University’s technical engineering department. He made use of both recent advancements in our understanding how rocks fracture, as well as improved computer code to model what happens when you smack an asteroid with something big.
