Nuclear one-two punch could knock out dangerous asteroid (VIDEO)

Scientists developing mission concept that would blow apart space rock threatening Earth.

Destroying a dangerous asteroid with a nuclear bomb is a well-worn trope of science fiction, but it could become reality soon enough. 

Scientists are developing a mission concept that would blow apart an Earth-threatening asteroid with a nuclear explosion, just like Bruce Willis and his oilmen-turned-astronaut crew did in the 1998 film "Armageddon." 

But unlike in the movie, the spacecraft under development — known as the Hypervelocity Asteroid Intercept Vehicle, or HAIV — would be unmanned. It would hit the space rock twice in quick succession, with the non-nuclear first blow blasting out a crater for the nuclear bomb to explode inside, thus magnifying its asteroid-shattering power.

"Using our proposed concept, we do have a practically viable solution — a cost-effective, economically viable, technically feasible solution," study leader Bong Wie, of Iowa State University, said Wednesday at the 2012 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) meeting in Virginia. [ 5 Reasons to Care About Asteroids ] 

When, not if Earth has been pummeled by asteroids throughout its 4.5 billion-year history, and some of the strikes have been catastrophic. For example, a 6-mile-wide (10 kilometers) space rock slammed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs. 

Earth is bound to be hit again, and relatively soon. Asteroids big enough to cause serious damage today — not necessarily the extinction of humans, but major disruptions to the global economy — have hit the planet on average every 200 to 300 years, researchers say. 

So humanity needs to have a plan in hand to deal with the next threatening asteroid, many scientists stress.

hat plan should include deflection strategies, they say. Given a few decades of lead time, a threatening space rock could be nudged off course — perhaps by employing a tag-along "gravity tractor" probe, or even by painting the asteroid white and letting sunlight give it a push. 

But humanity also needs to be prepared for an asteroid that pops up on scientists' radar just weeks before a potential impact. That scenario might demand the nuclear option that Wie and his colleagues are working to develop. 

NASA / Bong Wie / Iowa State University - This diagram shows a mission concept that would destroy an asteroid with a nuclear bomb, which would detonate in a crater blasted out by a smaller impactor.

A one-two punch NASA engineers identified 168 technical flaws in "Armageddon," Wie said. But one thing the movie got right is the notion that a nuke will be far more effective if it explodes inside an asteroid rather than at its surface. (At a depth of 10 feet, or 3 meters, the bomb's destructive power would be about 20 times greater, Wie said.)

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