If you're looking for uniformity in Nature, you won't find it in the asteroid belt. Not only are asteroid compositions different because they come from different parent bodies, but their shapes are different, too. They're not massive enough to round themselves like planets do.

This is more than just another space factoid; asteroid shapes matter. It's a near-certainty, given enough time, that a dangerous asteroid will head directly for a collision with Earth, and that's something scientists are actively studying. They want to develop ways to knock an asteroid off course, if necessary. That's what NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), and the ESA's follow-up Hera mission were about.

There are multiple concepts for redirecting a dangerous asteroid. One of them is a nuclear weapon. Not to obliterate an asteroid, but to bombard it with radiation by exploding the nuclear weapon in close proximity to the asteroid. This is called a stand-off X-ray mitigation scenario.…