August 4, 2026
Chinese rocket scientists find ‘most effective’ way to nuke a doomsday asteroid. China’s two-pronged method could blast apart an Earth-threatening space rock using a 3-megaton explosion equivalent to 200 Hiroshima bombs
Chinese researchers believe they may have found the most effective way to destroy or deflect a large, Earth-threatening asteroid – by burying a nuclear bomb beneath its surface and exploding it.
The idea is to first slam a metal penetrator into the asteroid, digging a deep hole. A second spacecraft would then drop a nuclear bomb into the hole and blow it up, according to a team led by researchers at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing.
In simulations, a 3-megaton explosion – or around 200 Hiroshima bombs – could completely blast apart an asteroid about 100 metres (328 feet) across, the team reported in the Space: Science & Technology journal in May.
The researchers also found that burying the bomb 30 metres beneath the surface could more than triple the change in the asteroid’s speed compared with a shallow explosion, making it far more effective at pushing the rock off course.
The approach – reminiscent of the 1998 disaster film Armageddon but carried out entirely by uncrewed spacecraft – had lower technical complexity and better defence effectiveness than simply slamming a bomb into the asteroid, the researchers argued.
Instead of relying on a high-speed impact at a random spot, the two-step method allows engineers to choose where to bury the bomb and place it much deeper beneath the surface.
It also avoids having the nuclear device survive a crash at up to 20km (12 miles) per second or explode within moments of impact, while transferring far more of the blast’s energy into the asteroid.
Asteroids are rocky leftovers from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of them orbit harmlessly between Mars and Jupiter, but some cross Earth’s path and have been closely tracked by astronomers.
In 2019, an asteroid up to 130 metres across flew past Earth at a distance of just 72,000km, detected by astronomers only shortly before its closest approach.
The only real-world test of asteroid deflection so far was Nasa’s Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission in 2022, when it deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid and successfully nudged it by reducing its speed by about 2.7mm per second.
However, for much larger objects or those spotted with little warning, simply crashing a spacecraft into them may not provide enough force to avert a disaster.
In such cases, a nuclear explosion might be the only practical option, the Chinese team said.
To test their ideas, the researchers created a computer-generated population of hypothetical Earth-threatening asteroids, assuming an approach speed of 10km per second. They then compared how different defence strategies would perform against asteroids of different sizes, trajectories and warning times.
The simulations showed that a 50-metre asteroid could be completely destroyed by a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion, equivalent to about 20 Hiroshima bombs. Increasing the yield to 3 megatons was enough to completely destroy a 100-metre asteroid.
Burial depth also made a big difference. For a 1km asteroid, placing a 3-megaton bomb 30 metres beneath the surface produced a velocity change of about 30cm per second – more than three times that achieved by burying it 10 metres deep and about 110 times the speed change produced during Nasa’s Dart mission.
The researchers acknowledged that the concept would only work if a dangerous asteroid was detected early enough to design, launch and carry out the two-spacecraft mission before impact.
It would also require heavy-lift launch vehicles capable of sending a penetrator and a nuclear payload into deep space.
“This study provides an important theoretical foundation for mission planning and engineering design of defence against large-sized or short-warning-time near-Earth asteroids and holds profound strategic significance for enhancing humanity’s capability to respond to asteroid impact threats,” they wrote.