The word 'unexpected' doesn't appear in the article. It's a fairly safe bet that the team of people capable of hitting a 581 foot object 6 million miles away with a 13,000 mph slug would have expected the ejection of material from the impact.

> blowing an asteroid up into a swarm that's potentially more dangerous

For starters, that is not what is suggested.

I don't think it's more dangerous it would just require more resources to counter. I mean day you have a3 like rock that splinters into 3x 1 mile rocks. I'm pretty sure we'll still have a bad day, especially with three impact sites but the magnitude of each impact will be less than the full impact of the fully intact 3 mile rock. Doing something is always better than nothing especially if we are facing extinction.

If only to say at least we tried. it's kind of amazing we actually live in an era where we can try. I mean it's only like 60 years of is being able to send rockets into space, we made it this long without needing to, but Knowing we can at least have a fighting chance is comforting.

Of course to win at this we also need to be able to detect in an early enough manner any and all disruptive size asteroids. it would suck too have the technology to save earth but not see our annihilation coming until it was too late to do anything.