Welcome to the latest installment of “Writer Fuel – cool real-world stories that might inspire your little writer heart. Check out our Writer Fuel page on the LimFic blog for more inspiration. Today:
A group of researchers wants to save Earth from a potential asteroid apocalypse using a new planetary defense method they call PI — short for “Pulverize It.”
The plan — detailed in a lengthy technical paper on the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Experimental Cosmology Group website and submitted to the journal Advances in Space Research — aims to smash large, potentially life-threatening asteroids into hundreds of tiny pieces by launching an array of “penetrator rods” into the asteroid’s path.
These rods, each measuring about 6 to 10 feet long (1.8 to 3 meters, could contain explosives — potentially even nuclear ones — to blast an approaching asteroid into relatively harmless bits long before it reaches Earth’s atmosphere, the researchers wrote.
