Armageddon
During the Earth’s long history, asteroids a kilometer in diameter have smacked into our planet, possibly causing mass extinctions and wreaking havoc with the atmosphere and climate. Scientists say it could happen again — and the impact would be sufficiently cataclysmic to imperil everyone on the globe.
Sanders, a senior from Roseburg, Oregon, is a physics major in OSU’s University Honors College who spent the summer of 2005 at the lab working on the amount of force a nuclear bomb would generate if detonated near an incoming asteroid, and whether it would blast it out of its path toward Earth.
“J.C.’s project is a good one in that it incorporates several branches of physics and applies them to a problem that not only is intriguing,” says Livermore astrophysicist Aaron Miles, “but also will at some point in the future become the most topical of issues.”