Where you aim matters fivefold: the asteroid-deflection maths gets real

If a dangerous asteroid ever heads for Earth, one defence is to flash one side of it with X-rays from a nuclear detonation and nudge it aside. Sandia National Laboratories physicist Nathan Moore's team has now modelled what real, lumpy asteroids do to that plan — because, as Moore puts it, spherical asteroids don't exist. In simulations published in Icarus, blasting different sides of the same irregular asteroid changed the push nearly fivefold — 3.9 millimetres per second of deflection from the best angle versus 0.8 from another — and changed its spin by a factor of 17. Their new algorithm runs more than 1,600 times faster than earlier models, making it possible to plan for the asteroid we'd actually get, not the billiard ball we imagined.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation