Scientists propose nuking solution to Doomsday asteroid as thousands of city-killers swarm Earth

That’s one way to stop the a-rock-alypse.Chinese scientists have devised an unorthodox solution to stop a potential Doomsday asteroid from destroying Earth — by nuking the space-rock with a force equivalent to multiple Hiroshima bombs.Seemingly taking a leaf from “Armageddon,” the researchers proposed first drilling deep inside the intergalactic gravelstone and then implanting the nuclear bomb inside this blast crater for detonation.“This study can provide references for the engineering design of defense against large near-Earth asteroids,” wrote the researchers, who hailed from the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing, The Independent reported.The somewhat unconventional solution comes amid a rash of near-misses involving asteroids, including a bus-sized space rock that came within 56,000 miles of Earth in May, Vice reported.NASA scientists have warned that there are as many as 15,000 several hundred-foot -wide asteroids that are small enough to avoid detection but large enough to destroy a city.With warning times ranging from days to weeks, there’s not enough time for planetary defense systems to deploy proposed countermeasures such as DART — in which NASA used a spacecraft to knock the asteroid Dimorphos off course in 2022.Per the latest study published in the journal Space: Science & Technology, the only viable way to nip a Doomsday asteroid in the bud would be via impregnating it with a nuclear device.To test this atomic solution, the researchers conducted a computer simulation involving hypothetical asteroids approaching Earth at a speed of 6 miles per second.They then tested how effective different defense measures would be against asteroids of varying sizes, speeds and trajectories.According to the simulations, a 164-foot asteroid could be obliterated with a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion — the same as around 20 Hiroshima bombs — while a 3-megaton blast could destroy a nearly 1,000-meter one, the South China Morning P...