"Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth's atmosphere. If they're big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And in case an even larger space rock were to ever threaten humanity, we'd have to get creative to keep it from colliding with our planet."
"In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications, an international team of researchers - including scientists from CERN and the University of Oxford - revisited the idea of blowing up an incoming asteroid with a nuclear warhead. There are intuitive concerns. What if the asteroid shattered, turning a cosmic sniper shot into a shotgun blast of debris raining down over our planet?"
Many asteroids survive atmospheric entry and can cause severe damage — for example, the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013 produced a blast about 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. Kinetic impactors like NASA's DART can redirect asteroids but are not always feasible. Experiments and large-scale simulations examined the effects of nuclear-level stress on asteroid materials using CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron and HiRadMat facilities and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. Metal-rich meteorite samples received 27 short, intense proton-beam pulses to probe structural response. Results indicate asteroid materials are surprisingly resilient, suggesting a nuclear detonation is more likely to deflect than to catastrophically fragment a large asteroid.
Read at Futurism
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