The “Armageddon” Plan to Save Earth Works Surprisingly Well

A CERN team bombarded a meteorite with a beam of protons and demonstrated that metallic asteroids resist nuclear explosions much better than previously thought; In other words, we wouldn’t risk surviving a large asteroid only to get hit in the head with a thousand pieces of it.

The 1998 film tells the story of a desperate space mission to save Earth from the impact of an asteroid the size of Texas.

Although the film has plot holes as large as the meteorite crater that wiped out the dinosaurs, the idea of ​​using nuclear bombs as a last resort in the face of an imminent impact, it works surprisingly wellaccording to a new study of CERN’s Proton Synchrotron (SPS).

Every few centuries A space rock large enough to cause damage in some regions of the Earth is approaching our planet, notes .

Among the last major impacts we have experienced are , which injured thousands of people in 2013, or , which leveled thousands of square kilometers of Siberian forest in 1908.

We are also exposed to collisions of larger objects that would be capable of erasing us from the face of the Earth. Fortunately, these space rocks are much rarer, but as the film (2021) ironically reminds us, planetary defense It’s not a joke and you need to be prepared.

One of our defense plans is to DART mission from NASA, which is already possible in 2022 divert a space rock from its trajectory by crashing a ship into it — a much more elegant and less risky technique than blowing them to pieces with a bomb.

According to scientists, the nuclear approach could fragment the asteroid in thousands of pieces that could also fall about us.

Or at least, That’s what they thought — until that of CERN, recently published in Nature Communicationswhich revealed that the material properties of certain asteroids could withstand detonations much better than current models predict.

But for the Armageddon plan to work, we need understand physics from material to detail. “The world must be capable of executing a nuclear diversion mission with great confidencebut you cannot carry out a test in the real world in advance”, guarantees Karl-Georg Schlesingerone of the study’s authors.

According to the expert, this uncertainty “imposes extraordinary demands to physical and material data”, something that this new study tried to resolve.

A meteorite bombarded in a laboratory

To simulate the effects of a nuclear explosion Without having to send a weapon of mass destruction into space, the team used CERN’s HiRadMat facilities.

At the scene, investigators picked up a meteorite rich in iron and nickel and they shot him 27 short and intense thrusts of a concentrated beam of protons 440 gigaeletronvolts — approximately 470 times the energy they have at rest, enough to reproduce extreme pressure and shock conditions in the laboratory similar to a nuclear explosion.

Far from disintegrating catastrophicallythe metallic material behaved in a surprising way: softened, bent and then hardened again. “The material has become stronger, with an increase in the elastic limit and a self-stabilizing damping behavior,” he explains. Melanie Bochmannco-leader of the team responsible for the study together with Schlesinger.

In fact, subsequent analyzes confirmed that the material strength increased by a factor of 2.5 after the experiment. These results indicate that, at least for metal-rich asteroids, we could use a nuclear device much larger than previously thought without breaking the rock.

“This keeps an emergency option open for situations involving very large objects or very short warning times,” says Bochmann.

An asteroid on the way in 2032

The CERN study comes at a time when we need to have all possible planetary defenses at hand. Last year, the ATLAS system discovered , a rock measuring around 50 meters that has become the most monitored object on the current risk list.

Although its probability of a direct impact against Earth remains at a high, an unexpected turn in November 2025 raised the probability to a worrying 4.3%.

A lunar impact could expel into space around one hundred million tons of debris, starting a collision cascade which would destroy thousands of satellites in Earth orbit. This machine gun could render the technological infrastructure essential for modern civilization unusable, from GPS to global communications.

Furthermore, monitoring the elusive 2024 YR4 is very complicated. Its eccentric orbit causes it to move away from us in an almost straight line and soon will disappear from our sight by 2028leaving us blind for years.

With the potential meeting scheduled for December 22, 2032the scientific community is working around the clock to decide whether a DART-style kinetic impact will suffice — or whether it will be necessary to resort to the nuclear artillery of Armageddon.

Or if we’re simply going to have the fate prophesied in “Don’t Look Up”…