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Bruce Willis
The Bruce Willis approach from “Armageddon” (1998) might be our favourite, though it is extremely unrealistic. Willis performs Harry Stamper, an oil miner by commerce, who leads a gaggle of unlikely astronauts, largely colleagues from his oil rig. They fly out to a hazardous asteroid and attempt to drill deep within the floor; as soon as the probe is deep sufficient, the story goes, a nuke ought to be sufficient to blow the asteroid off target.
Stamper is decided to do the work properly: “I’ve by no means, NEVER missed a depth that I’ve aimed for,” he assures NASA and his group. However issues do not precisely go to plan. The scheme probably would not have labored anyway, as probably all of the nuke would have accomplished was blow up the asteroid right into a cloud of particles nonetheless on monitor to hit Earth.
But when nothing else, Willis and his Hollywood group raised the profile of planetary protection excessive sufficient to get within the public eye. In the identical 12 months that “Armageddon” and the opposite large space asteroid movie of that point, “Deep Affect,” launched, Congress directed NASA to seek out the entire near-Earth asteroids a minimum of 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) large that might pose an affect threat to Earth.
Associated: Asteroid science: How ‘Armageddon’ got it wrong
