00:04The film Armageddon had a simple enough premise. Send some people to an incoming earth-destroying
00:09asteroid and blow it up with some nukes. As fun and ridiculous as that premise is,
00:13it might actually work in reality. The scenario in the film would be referred to as a late-time
00:18small-body disruption, or destroying asteroids on the smaller end of the spectrum after discovering
00:23them with little time to react. And according to new research into the topic, experts say
00:27that a nuclear warhead at the right place at the right time would be very effective against an
00:32asteroid. But it's not so simple as just hitting the object. Calculations need to account for
00:36fragments coming off of the asteroid as well. Patrick King, a physicist from John Hopkins
00:40University, had this to say about it. One of the challenges in assessing disruption is that you
00:45need to model all of the fragment orbits, which is generally far more complicated than modeling
00:49a simple deflection. Which is why they calculated impacts for five asteroid sizes at different
00:54distances, measured from one week to six months in the future, finding that on the longer range of
00:59the spectrum, even if the asteroid is quite large, they could still reduce the impact scenario to just
01:031% of what it might have been. And for smaller asteroids at closer range, around two months away,
01:08they could reduce the size of the object and therefore its mass to only 0.1% of what it
01:13once was.
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