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Of course, it's also conceivable that we can calibrate our missile weaponry to intercept such an object. We've put entire ships into space and sent complex satellites on finely calculated journeys past Saturn. I hold no fears that, by 2019, we'll be unable to throw a few glorified bombs into the meteor's path. One atomic bomb levelled Nagasaki. I think two or three could handle a rock with a span of only a couple kilometers. It doesn't even require much fuel. Just enough for a missile to escape Earth's orbit. From there, the flight path would be calculated and the missile could probably coast toward its target.
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Eh, I don't know. The largest bomb the US ever detonated, "Castle Bravo", (15 MT) only left a crater one mile wide and just slightly less than 300 feet deep. In
coral. (The fireball itself was more than three miles wide.) Good luck vaporizing something made out of solid rock (or even worse, iron) and moving at thousands of miles per hour. That's a lot of kinetic energy! Even a
huge bomb (such as a Tsar Bomba size bomb, roughly 50MT) probably wouldn't have much of an effect. High altitude test detonations (such as shots "Teak" and "Orange") dissipated almost immediately, and those weren't even fully in outer space. In the vacuum of space, there is no air to form a fireball, or a shock wave. The energy of the bomb would radiate out into space unimpeded. (Supposedly; there has never been a deep-space bomb detonation, so nobody knows what would truly happen.)
Even so, there is no upper limit on how large and powerful you can make a thermonuclear weapon, so who knows. Maybe a truly
huge bomb could do it. Maybe. There are also deflection strategies, but you'd have to intercept it very far out to make those kinds of trajectory changes. I guess I'm just a skeptic.
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Further observations of the object have since re-rated the threat lower. As of July 25, 2002, the hazard rating on the Palermo scale had been lowered to -0.25. However, the discovery of an object with an initial hazard rating above 0.0 is still a significant event in the history of the NEO observation program.
On August 1, 2002, the object was removed from the list of objects that present a threat, at least for the next 100 years.
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Jam it back in, in the dark.