Chances are that we will eventually ruin this planet to such an extent that it’s unable to support any form of life.

On a happier note, if a Doomsday asteroid arrives to do the job before that we might actually stand a chance!

Yup, NASA are busy preparing a massive nuclear spacecraft that would be capable of “shunting or blowing up an asteroid if it was on course to wipe out life on Earth”.

It even has a catchy name, the Hammer, which stands for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response.

The space agency has been warning about a potential asteroid collision for some time, saying that last year’s 100-foot 2012TC4 asteroid came “damn close” to striking Antarctica.

The Telegraph have more details on why the Hammer is deemed necessary:

In detailed plans published in the journal Acta Astronautica, NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration, calculated the time and payload it would take to move or destroy the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu.

NASA already has a space probe on route to Bennu to take samples and has been monitoring the asteroid since it was discovered in 1999.

Dante Lauretta, professor of Planetary Science in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, said  Bennu’s impact would release “three times more energy than all nuclear weapons detonated throughout history”.

Get a load of these Hammer plans:

Great, but here’s a spot of bad news:

…the study showed that Earth would need years of warning to be able to put a deterrent plan in action.

The experts calculate that 7.4 years would be needed from building Hammer, to the craft hitting the asteroid.

Not sure I trust us to pull that one off, to be honest.

If you would rather place your trust in an organisation that isn’t American, you’re in luck:

Earlier this week a team of Russian researchers from Rosatom, the state nuclear energy corporation, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), announced they had constructed and blown up tiny asteroids in the lab to calculate how much power it would take to prevent a devastating impact.

Using laser pulses to simulate the effect of a nuclear bomb they found that to eliminate a 650 foot wide asteroid, the blast would need to deliver the energy equivalent of three megatons of TNT – the equivalent of 200 Hiroshima bombs.

Yeah, it’s a race between the Americans and the Russians to see who can create something powerful enough to destroy an asteroid.

Guaranteed to end well.

[source:telegraph]