You’ve likely heard by now that the movie Armageddon got it all wrong — it’s just not feasible to blow up an asteroid heading toward Earth with a bomb or few. But how unrealistic is it, really? New research set for publication March 15 in the planetary science journal Icarus is sending any hope humanity might have had to nuke an incoming asteroid threat even further into the realm of impossibility. Breaking up asteroids, it turns out, is really, really hard to do.

The new study was led by