Could nukes deflect an asteroid? ‘X-ray scissors’ offer scientists clues.
There are many theories on how to best handle a rare (but possible) cataclysmic asteroid collision with Earth. Effectively testing these possible solutions against actual space rocks, however, is complex, costly, and takes years to achieve. Now, researchers believe they created an easier way (relatively speaking) to assess one of the most dramatic proposals: deploying a nuclear bomb. To pull off their recent experiments, a team at Sandia National Laboratories devised a new tool they call “X-ray scissors.”
In 2022, NASA’s Double Action Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully altered an asteroid’s trajectory after slamming a spacecraft into the roughly 560-foot-wide rock at 13,000 mph. While a major moment in researching contingency plans for deflecting catastrophic Earthbound asteroids, the overall project wasn’t cheap. All told, the mission cost around $324.5 million to complete. This means that planning numerous repeat performances isn’t a feasible strategy to further study asteroid deflection. But if you could simulate an asteroid, its surroundings, and nuclear blast forces in a lab, then that would make many model experiments possible.
To approximate a nuclear detonation, a team led by Sandia National Laboratories physicist Nathan Moore relied on the institution’s room-sized “Z machine,” the world’s strongest pulsed-power device. As National Geographic explains, once the Z machine is activated, argon gas receives a huge blast of electricity causing it to explode into super hot plasma similar to the surface of the Sun. This plasma also creates megajoule-sized bursts of X-ray radiation, similar to a nuclear detonation in space. The cumulative effect is so powerful that the Z machine can melt diamonds.
