{"id":239826,"date":"2026-01-15T18:19:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T18:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/239826\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T18:19:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T18:19:09","slug":"scientists-use-cern-proton-beam-to-assess-nuclear-asteroid-deflection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/239826\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists use CERN proton beam to assess nuclear asteroid deflection"},"content":{"rendered":"

NASA\u2019s DART mission, the first-ever planetary defense test in space, sent a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid in 2022. <\/p>\n

That mission was a success. It showed that, in a hypothetical scenario where a massive asteroid was hurtling towards Earth, NASA could send a spacecraft to slam into<\/a> it and alter its trajectory.<\/p>\n

Scientists see this as a much more favorable alternative to nuclear deflection, which would use a powerful nuclear bomb to destroy the asteroid. This method would still pose a serious risk to Earth, as the space rock could fragment into many smaller pieces that could still make their way towards our planet. <\/p>\n

Though nuclear deflection is a last resort, a team at CERN\u2019s Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) has carried out a new investigation, showing that some asteroid materials could be more resilient against nuclear explosions than previously thought.<\/p>\n

A unique planetary defense test<\/p>\n

One of the most important variables when it comes to any planetary defense mission is the materials properties of the asteroid. Whether it\u2019s smashed by a spacecraft or blown up by a nuclear weapon, the composition of a space rock plays a huge role in its eventual state or trajectory.<\/p>\n

The new paper<\/a> by the CERN SPS team, published in the journal Nature Communications, details how the team used advanced models to determine the effectiveness of nuclear deflection.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlanetary defence represents a scientific challenge,\u201d Karl-Georg Schlesinger, co-founder of OuSoCo, said, according to a report<\/a> from CERN Courier. OuSoCo is a startup developing advanced material-response models the scientists used to benchmark large-scale nuclear deflection simulations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world must be able to execute a nuclear deflection mission with high confidence, yet cannot conduct a real-world test in advance,\u201d Schlesinger continued. \u201cThis places extraordinary demands on material and physics data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using a proton beam to simulate a nuclear detonation<\/p>\n

To address this uncertainty, the team performed experiments at CERN\u2019s HiRadMat facility, as a part of the Fireball collaboration with the University of Oxford. They shot 27 successive short, intense pulses of the facility\u2019s 440\u2009GeV SPS proton beam at a sample of the Campo del Cielo meteorite. These experiments simulated some of the effects of a nuclear blast within a lab setting, without having to detonate a weapon of mass destruction.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe material became stronger, exhibiting an increase in yield strength, and displayed a self-stabilising damping behaviour,\u201d Melanie Bochmann, co-founder and co-team lead, explained in the CERN Courier report. \u201cOur experiments indicate that \u2013 at least for metal-rich asteroid material \u2013 a larger device than previously thought can be used without catastrophically breaking the asteroid.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the researchers, this is actually a good thing. It suggests that a powerful nuclear weapon could be used to deflect an asteroid, without fragmenting it into many smaller pieces.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis keeps open an emergency option for situations involving very large objects or very short warning times,\u201d Bochmann explained, \u201cwhere non-nuclear methods are insufficient and where current models might assume fragmentation would limit the usable device size.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s DART mission, the first-ever planetary defense test in space, sent a spacecraft to crash into an asteroid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[106004,9547,1409,85,46,5688,141],"class_list":["post-239826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-armageddon","tag-asteroids","tag-astronomy","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-planetary-defense","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}