It is called ‘HAMMER’ and it will do to asteroids what Thor’s hammer, Mjölnir, did to the Asgardian God’s enemies. What is more, there will not be one HAMMER but an entire fleet of them.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are currently planning to create the HAMMER, which is an acronym for Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response.

The HAMMER is basically a spacecraft designed to deflect an incoming asteroid from hitting earth. If it fails in deflecting the asteroid, the plan is to nuke it.

The project is crucial because asteroids, depending on their size, can be devastating for the planet. Asteroid Bennu, for instance, might hit Earth in 2035. Bennu is weighs 33.5 billion kilograms and is 1,600 foot wide. If it hits Earth – and there is a 1-in-2700 chance that it will – Bennu will produce a 1.15 Gigaton explosion.

In mathematical terms, the impact will be 23 times more than the largest ever hydrogen bomb ever detonated. To understand the threat in simpler terms, a 480 kiloton nuclear explosion can wipe out Houston, the largest city in Texas, the US. Bennu will produce 11,50,000 kilotons of explosion.

And it is Bennu which NASA has its eyes on for a before-the-actual test of the HAMMER spacecraft.

OSIRIS-Rex, NASA’s asteroid study programme, will be collecting a sample from the surface of the asteroid later this year. The space agency is using the trajectory of OSIRIS-Rex to chart the calculations for the proposed HAMMER. The study is crucial because Bennu is the only known near-Earth object as of now for such calculations.

HAMMER is still in the ideation stage. It is expected to weigh 8.8 ton. The ‘asteroid eliminator’ will hit incoming asteroids at a speed of 22,000 miles per hour for enough force to deflect asteroids of specific sizes.

Quoting researchers, BuzzFeed News reports that there will be more than one HAMMER required to steer an asteroid off its course. Only if the multiple HAMMERs fail in their initial objective will the nuke be deployed. It is for this purpose the HAMMER will be outfitted with a nuke.

But everything depends on the sample from Bennu which OSIRIS-Rex will collect. The sample will reveal a lot of data about asteroids – necessary for the creation of a ‘weapon’ which aims to destroy them. OSIRIS-Rex will return to Earth by 2023.