When asteroids hurtle towards Earth in Hollywood films, astronauts often deploy nuclear warheads against them in order to save humanity. Now, scientists have found this strategy could actually help deflect an incoming cosmic impact — not by blowing an asteroid up with a nuke, but by exploding one more than a mile above its surface to shower it with X-ray radiation.
As the catastrophic end of the Age of Dinosaurs about 66 million years ago reveals, cosmic impacts can have disastrous effects for life on Earth. "Asteroids aren’t just history — they still impact the Earth today," Nathan Moore, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., told Space.com. "Apophis, a near-Earth object about the size of the Olympic stadium, flew by Earth just last week."
