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Planetary defense test deflected an asteroid but unleashed a boulder swarm
(newsroom.ucla.edu)
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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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So by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but is this really that bad?
Like, people always freak out about "turning one falling object into many" because they would still share the same collective kinetic energy, but smaller objects are far more likely to burn up high in the atmosphere rather than penetrate for a destructive impact.
The article describes 37 boulders, each with a ~15kT kinetic energy. We have record of meteor events in this magnitude, and they aren't terribly destructive. Nor is it more than a footnote in terms of Earth's daily total energy budget; the Earth isn't going to be cooked by a meteor-swarm of this scale.
It'd seem to me that the biggest risk would actually be peppering Earth's orbital region with far smaller objects that could still damage satellites, no?
Just two things to consider: A deflection attempt at scale would generate much more debris. And peppering the atmosphere with hundreds of 15kT impactors over the course of minutes will still heat most surfaces with line of sight to the event(s) above their flash point, because you have just optimized the conversion from kinetic to radiative thermal energy.
(I blame CGI for notoriously underselling the brightness of meteors)