We all know the properties of chocolate pudding, and most of us can imagine the properties of a space-rock. Chocolate pudding–depending on whether or not you’ve messed up making it–tends to be pretty viscous, thick, and creamy. Asteroids tend to be made up of a slew of disparate materials such as rock, metal, and possible even ice. How much of the former would it take to effectively stop a statistically common sized copy of the latter? In many ways, this may seem like a silly question; however, science has provided many observations and theories that may aid in gaining some sort of handle upon a possible answer.

Asteroids rip through a planet’s atmosphere fast. Really, really fast. So fast, that the term “hyper velocity” is used when examining the force, speed, and impact an asteroid may have when it comes into contact with a surface of any kind. Hyper velocity impacts are incredibly hard to model, as a there are a vast rage of factors and possible outcomes. The most common outcome is outright vaporization. Such an outcome seems natural when a large ball of solid, hard matter smashes into an object at the rate of 3000 m/s. One should also take into account that asteroids tend to have a density that ranges up to 5.32 g/cc.

Chocolate pudding, on the other hand, has a density that is much similar to water. This density is measured in around 1g/cc. Pudding in general seems like it is a pretty confounding material. It walks a fine line between solidity and fluidity at room temperature. Science has dubbed fluids such as chocolate pudding to be labeled into a category called a non-newtonian fluid. A non-newtonian fluid is essentially a fluid that doesn’t act similarly to water or oil: it doesn’t follow many of the physical laws that liquid water does.

According to Isaac Newton, penetration depth tends to be related to the ratio of densities between the impactor and the impacted. With this in mind, it seems as though the answer is pretty simple. Taking into account the numbers mentioned previously, one would need more than 5 asteroid-lengths of pudding in order to adequately halt the object moving at hypervelocity.

However, one of the major problems one faces in combating the impact of an object such as an asteroid and mitigating the destruction wrought is the way in which materials are organized to deflect the impactor. Often times, a single shield is just splintered entirely by the impact. A Whipple shield is a far more effective solution that one should pursue if they are ever faced with stopping a destructive with pudding and other materials.