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Asked by 925spcc29 to Rhys, Mike, Katie, Dan, Camilla on 14 Jun 2015.
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Katie Sparks answered on 14 Jun 2015:
I don’t think I could make a missile, I could perhaps make up part of a team to design something like that.
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Rhys Archer answered on 15 Jun 2015:
I couldn’t make the missile, but maybe I could look into the types of materials that would be needed to fire a missile that would destroy an asteroid. There would need to be safe casing for the missile itself, as the magnitude of that kind of explosion we wouldn’t want it to go off before getting to the asteroid. The plane or space craft that carried it would also need to be made of specialised materials to withstand the intense forces and temperature changes in space. Perhaps we could also look into some materials for a super shield for earth to – something with huge impact resistance as well as something that can withstand great heat?
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Camilla Weiss answered on 15 Jun 2015:
Well, now I’m going to be worrying about an asteroid hitting the Earth in September, thanks!
I don’t think making the missile would be too hard – sadly missiles are something that humans are quite good at making. The tricky part would be getting it to the asteroid and hitting it in exactly the right place to make sure the asteroid gets blasted into small enough pieces. If the asteroid is big enough to destroy the Earth it probably too big to be taken out with a single missile. In fact you would probably need a nuclear missile to completely destroy it.
There are actually some slightly crazier-sounding but still plausible ideas which would work much better than a missile (check out the University of Strathclyde for the asteroid deflection ideas). The idea is to change the orbit of the asteroid slightly (you wouldn’t need to change it much to avoid the Earth if it’s far enough away) – there are several ways to achieve this: a space mirror which would focus sunlight on the asteroid and heat it up causing jets of super heated material to change the orbit; Painting the asteroid! This would change the way sunlight interacts with the asteroid and again could be used to heat the asteroid to change its course; Using low thrusters to nudge the asteroid out the way; Drilling into the asteroid and launching the drilled material to push the asteroid into a different orbit. These might sound crazy but they are all doable and are good examples of how creative engineering can be!
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