Calculating the plan of the movie “Armagendon”

What would happen in case of a giant asteroid that came on a collision course with the earth, we would be able to break it like Bruce Willis did in the movie Armageddon; NASA's plan was not to destroy it but to split it in half.

That question has been answered by a group of physics students from the University of Leicester, they did the calculations and published a study analyzing whether it was possible that Bruce Willis and his team of drillers could have saved humanity with the plan that NASA had designed. .

The students based themselves on some of the data offered by the film, it says that the asteroid is the size of Texas, I confess that when I saw the film I assumed that it was referring to the surface of the Lone Star State, which has an area of 695 thousand kilometers and that is more or less the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is about 500 kilometers in diameter.

But the students took the data from the film as the length or the diameter of Texas and therefore the diameter of the asteroid, so they worked with an asteroid of 1000 km in diameter, that is practically a dwarf planet, it is almost the size of the planet dwarf ceres.

The students calculated how far the two fragments of the earth would have to pass so that they did not cause an impact and they calculated that they would have to pass at least 640 kilometers from the earth's surface on both sides, that would be an impressive sight to see a piece of rock 500 kilometers in diameter passing 640 kilometers above the surface.

The second calculation shows that the asteroid in the film could only be detected with the Hubble Space Telescope, which at the time of making the film was the most powerful in existence, and they calculated that Hubble would have been able to detect an asteroid of this size at 12,874 kilometers away, or about 8 billion miles, that's much further than Pluto is from the sun, which would prove to give us several years to prepare for a mission.

The students also calculated the density and composition of that giant asteroid, in the film I remind them that the drillers ended up finding a vein of metal just a few meters from the surface, so the asteroid must have been very rich in metals, and that it's quite troublesome both to break it and to do anything on it.

The conclusion of the students is that, in order to fulfill the mission of the film, it would take a nuclear bomb billion times more powerful than the great Ivan or bombazar, which was the super atomic bomb that the Soviet Union exploded in 1961. , the most powerful atomic bomb that has ever been built, that power is what is needed, therefore it is enormous, not even putting together the entire nuclear arsenal of the earth could we have such power to split an asteroid 1000 km in diameter and Bruce Willis in the movie arranging a nuclear bomb in normal theory, therefore no Bruce Willis could not have saved humanity.

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