No.
Here's a simple analogy.
A meteor hitting Earth is like trying to hit a marble at the end of a huge gymnasium, by rolling a very slow and heavy bowling ball at it. It's basically impossible. Then, even if you DO get the exact angle, spin, trajectory that you need. There's a little kid running around with a foam noodle, and they can ever so slightly alter the course of the ball by hitting at it. All it would take is us sending a rocket at the meteor to disrupt its course by a tiny slither, and it'll either miss earth completely, or the asteroid would break apart, into many small pieces and they'd then burn up as they go through the atmosphere (yes, just like in The Simpsons).
Its all a matter of speed, and angle evidently. Only limitation is friction
Give me a golf ball capable of traveling and sustaining the speed of light and I destroy the earth, and much more
You're talking to less than 80kg capable of hitting beyond 800 on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rJx_UBouek
826 on the dog shit day, to be accurate
It's safe to assume I know more about percussion than you do my friend
I understand how it works, but an asteroid isn't travelling at the speed of light, it's going about 4 times the Earth's escape velocity:
https://mae.ufl.edu/~uhk/ASTEROID.pdf
I just did the (rough) math of an absolute worst case scenario. If an asteroid of 1km diameter, with a mass of about 1e12 kg was heading straight for the middle of Earth, with a speed of 40km/s, and it was discovered by the time it was about the distance to Mars... then yes, we'd be well and truly fucked.
However, the bigger an asteroid is, the easier it is to spot. Also, they don't head straight for us, they orbit the sun and other objects. So they'd do a few loops around the sun before they hit us.
I don't know how much momentum a bomb of sorts would impart on the asteroid; I just used basic conservation of momentum, or what would happen if you just launched a bunch of kinetic rockets at the bastard. The problem is, a 1km asteroid is fucking heavy. But yes, if you load up enough nukes, and the asteroid had a few more orbits before it actually hits, then I would assume you could divert its course enough so that it would miss us, depending on the asteroid.
If you blew it up into smaller pieces then that would work even better, because any non-iron meteor under 100m tends to just break up in the atmosphere, and the pieces hit the ground at terminal velocity.
Either way, as long as we keep monitoring space and keeping tabs on things, there should be nothing to worry about.
They didn't see this one coming https://youtu.be/Y7Rx2PZ7C0c?t=5
(post is archived)