X-rays against asteroids.

Everyone has found themselves at least once in their life thinking about something totally random and one of those moments you have stopped to think about the danger that an asteroid could represent for the Earth, believe it, an impact could devastate our planet in question. of moments exactly as is believed to have happened to the dinosaurs millions of years ago, but now scientists are developing innovative ways to protect us from that threat. Recently researchers from the Sandía National lab presented a proof of concept that could change the panorama, they diverted an asteroid using a lightning explosion, it is one of those ideas that seems taken from science fiction, but this time it is not a mission for Bruce Willis , this idea is closer to reality than you imagine. Concern about asteroids is not new since the catastrophe that is believed to have extinct the dinosaurs, we know well what can cause a great impact, a simple asteroid could release energy equivalent to billions of atomic bombs and to prevent something like this from happening again happen NASA has been preparing.

The Sentry mission, for example, monitors asteroids near the Earth and calculates their trajectories to predict the risk of collision. If we have enough time, perhaps we can avoid the disaster. In 2022, NASA took an important step with the Dart mission by launching a spacecraft against an asteroid and successfully changing its orbit, a promising solution, but with a high cost that requires a lot of advance time. Now Watermelon scientists have presented a faster and cheaper alternative, imagine this, detonating a nuclear explosion near an asteroid, without destroying it completely, but generating enough heat to create jets of steam that push it away, this strategy could be the key to saving the planet, in the watermelon laboratories researchers simulated this idea in experiments using samples of quartz and fused silica materials similar to those that make up many asteroids. They used the powerful Z machine that generates pulses of Data the team designed full-scale deflection simulations and concluded that this method could work for asteroids up to 4 km wide. To put it into perspective an asteroid that size could cause global destruction.