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...not to say anything about the scientific inaccuracies in the movie when we watched Armageddon. Man, that was the most painful hour and a half of my life (I found an excuse to leave before it was over).
For one thing, there ARE NO ASTEROIDS THE SIZE OF TEXAS. The biggest one is about 300 miles across, and all the big ones are in very stable orbits. There is a name for an asteroid the size of Texas - a planet. And if it was that big, it would have been spherical, since it would be almost as big as our moon.
Deep Impact was a lot more accurate in that they saw the comet a couple of years before it hit. A new planetary body the size of Texas would probably be detected a long time before then, we would definitely notice it more than, what was it, 14 days before it hit? You would have been able to see the disk of it from Earth at that point.
If there WAS an asteroid that big, there is nothing at all we could do to change it's course, even if we had years to prepare. The idea of breaking it up is even more ludicrous. I had problems with the idea of being able to break up the comet in Deep Impact with nukes - MAYBE it would be possible. The best thing to do would be to mount thrusters on it to apply lateral acceleration over a period of time, breaking it up would not help much even if you could.
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