I was at the Planetary Defense Conference when Dr Burkey presented this work. The previous talk had been on a detailed hydrodynamics simulation which measured characteristics of rubble-pile asteroids, run on a supercomputer.
She started with something like “That was cute, wasn’t it? I am going to talk about our simulation of every photon during a nuclear detonation.” It was awesome.
And the picture is a woman looking very pleased and "yes, I always wanted to throw nuclear bombs at asteroids, and there’s nothing you can do about it!" :D
