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Originally Posted by Excalibur Bane
Still, I always chuckled at that line in Deep Impact where Morgan Freeman is saying something like "Our nuclear strike has failed. Our 152 Titan missiles failed to change the course of the rogue asteroid." Phew. Yeah, and Elvis really isn't dead either. Stupid movie. I don't care what the hell a rock is made of or how fast it's going, it's gonna be space dust if I send 150 nukes at it.
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It's been awhile since I've seen that movie. I think they had something like 5 years to alter the course of the asteroid. If it's too close, or moving too fast, it's completely possible for it to be too massive for a significant shift in trajectory.
It's far more probable for an solar orbiting asteroid to crash into Earth, than a non-orbiting asteroid. I don't remember exactly, but out near pluto, the limit is something like 9km/sec. Anything faster than that won't stay in orbit around Sol. Near Earth, it's much higher; Earth moves at about 30km/sec, so I'd guess the escape speed is 40km/sec. I forget how fast Voyager 2 is moving, but it's gotta be doing over 9km/sec, and it took over a decade to reach Neptune.
That had to have been a fast moving asteroid in that movie. Really fast. A non-orbiting asteroid. Definately a worst-case scenario.