Armageddon

For starters let me say this movie was truly awful, like I don't know which is worse listening to my house mate Caroline try and fail at a British accent or this movie. between the cringe worthy writing or the atrocious misuse of physics with that whole zero barrier thing and drilling a hole in the asteroid putting a nuke in it and hoping it splits apart honestly they needed to just not.  

Anyways for shits and giggles lets just come up with a plan for if there were a extinction level event asteroid heading our way what would we do? Well for starters we would know well in advance like +20 years so we'd have plenty of time to prepare. The minimum size asteroid needed to kill off all life on earth is 95km so I'm going to say mine is 100km and we are going to say its traveling at 
2x10^8m/s, so fairly fast. So what I need to find is how much force do I need to use so that when it would have hit earth it will miss. the formula I will use to find the force is mass times acceleration.

F=MA

So to use this formula I need to find the mass and the equation for it is;

M=VD 

for this one I need to find volume so that is were I start we are going to cheat and assume that the asteroid is a sphere so to fine the volume I'll use this formula;

V=4/3πr^3

to which I get the volume is equal to 

V=523598.77 

and then I plug it into the mass formula and get 

M=52359877.56   

and last but not least put that into the formula for force and get

F=MA
F=52359877.56x(2x10^8)
F=1.04x10^23

So that's about how much force the rocket would need to slam into the asteroid with. These calculations are going off the assumption that we would know 20 years in advance and would be able to hit it at the 10 year mark. 






Comments

  1. Pretty fast?!? 2x10^8 m/s is almost 60% of the speed of light. That's CRAZY fast! What did you use for a density, because your mass looks pretty small for an asteroid that big. OK, those points aside, you did make one mistake that some other students also made of confusing a velocity with an acceleration. We'll review this in class, but be sure you know the difference before the test.

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