Destroying an asteroid out of the sky to save the Earth is a great matter for the silver screen. However, new research hints that simply blasting a menacing space rock may not save the Earth quite easily as it has been expected.

Scientists detected crook asteroids roaming our solar system often. Just last month they found one asteroid that could hit the Earth and one of the measures to deal with these likely threats is to jolt them, knocking them down obviously. NASA is presently planning an asteroid divert mission where it will be sending a kamikaze space probe into the moonlet of an asteroid known as Didymos, running into the rock to drive it away.

Although scientists didn’t get a lot of chances to examine asteroids closely; hence, it can’t be valued how exactly the asteroids are arranged or how it can be destroyed. It has been presumed that bigger asteroids might be very easy to demolish as they are probably going to have fissures and weaknesses, which makes them easy to destroy.

Some questions which a team of scientists at John Hopkins University have come up with are obvious, such as ‘Should the asteroid be broken into small pieces?’ or, ‘Should it be nudged to go in another direction?’ in case one opts for the latter option, then how much force should be applied so that the asteroid doesn’t break, yet move in different direction.

The study, published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Icarus, is based on computer simulations of asteroid impacts.

Parameters were pushed that digitally recapped a small asteroid, about 1 kilometre wide, jolting a large asteroid about 25 times larger, while moving at 5 kilometres per second. An earlier study had shown that the large asteroid was eliminated by this type of collision; however, the Johns Hopkins team discovered an entirely different closing. According to their assumption, the asteroid would greatly snap in the fractions of a second after a jolt.

The fortitude of the asteroid to oppose such an effect allows it to maintain its gravitational pull, which could cause havoc if we were to blindly fire rockets at an incoming rock.