A1 7 Before and After-oid Impact

Abstract

As an alternative method of redirecting the asteroid in the film Armageddon, we looked into the technique used by the DART mission; momentum transfer through a kinetic impactor. Through orbital trajectory simulations, we find that when applied to this scenario, a kinetic impactor of the same relative size as DART and its asteroid would need to have a mass of ∼ 1.6 × 1014 kg and travel at a velocity of over 1960 km/s in order to avert catastrophe.