The most popular example of an extinction event is the asteroid extinction, as it heads towards the planet, and kills most life in the process.
It was heavily theorized that the dinosaurs suffered this conclusion, but researchers at Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico devised a method to defend the planet from such a fate.
Published in a report on Sept. 23 in the journal Nature Physics, physicists at Sandia hypothesized that exposure to high-energy electromagnetic radiation could move an asteroid, and could even divert its trajectory if exposed to enough of it.
“There’s only one method that has been proposed that has enough energy to deflect the most threatening asteroids, the largest asteroids, or in some cases even smaller asteroids where warning time is short,” physicist Nathan Moore said.
Asteroid defense methods were tested by NASA around two years ago, when the asteroid Dimorphos had its trajectory diverted as a NASA spacecraft crashed into it. Such methods get the job done, but come at a waste of a spacecraft and only work with smaller asteroids.
The experiment began with a vacuum chamber that held a “mock asteroid” made of quartz, a mineral that contains silica, which is found in real asteroids, that was the size of a blueberry. For 6.6 nanoseconds, the team at Sandia blasted the material with the world’s most powerful X-ray generator, which vaporized the quartz’s surface. The blast also left behind a gas plume, which acted as a force on the mineral.
“The expanding plume pushed on the quartz like a rocket’s exhaust, propelling the mineral away from the X-ray source at roughly 250 kilometers per hour,” Moore said.
Further tests were conducted with fused silica. The team found through a computer simulation that a similar blast to an asteroid of similar composition could deflect asteroids up to four kilometers wide, equivalent to the length of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Moore and his team aspire to conduct similar experiments with other common asteroid components, such as Iron and Nickel.
“Asteroids come in, made of different kinds of minerals,” he said. “This is just a starting point.”
