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The trick is early interception. Push something 10 years early and 0.1 m/s = ~30,000 km. Wait until 1 month out and you need to shove it 100x as fast.



yeah - how do you keep it out gassing long enough to hit 0.1 m/s though? I would imagine you'd need to nuke it every couple of days or say every week to keep it out gassing long enough to generate that big a change speed?

Hmm - I guess not! According to [1] it would take less then a ton of TNT to accelerate 1 million tonnes (eg like asteroid 12932-zephyr) to 0.1 m/s...So its probably a good thing I'm not responsible for these things!

Thanks to everyone for their help!

1 https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/kinetic-energy




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