Asteroids are not round little
globes that hurtle through space. A few of the largest ones are, but for the most part, they are encrusted with
craters and shaped like potatoes or peanuts, irregular little wedges of
iron or
stone.
Also, I would like to point out the discrepancies that Hollywood sci-fi movies have managed to turn into widely believed myths.
- You cannot knock an asteroid out of its path by nuking it. If an asteroid is on a direct collision course with earth, nuking it will simply leave us to deal with a cluster of smaller rocks, which are just as treacherous.
- There is always a scene where the gallant hero steers the spacecraft out of the path of menacing rocks as they fly through an asteroid belt. You’ll witness asteroids flying this way and that, thousands at a time just waiting to collide with the earthlings’ ship.. but in reality, space is so vast that if you were in the middle of an asteroid belt, you’d be hard pressed to observe one or two asteroids with the naked eye.