Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (13 page)

Doomsday Rock
, another television film, came out in 1997 and concerned a noted astronomer who figured out that a comet was headed this way based on an ancient civilization's time line. True to form, he is ignored by most people, but a few are convinced and, with him, take over a missile silo and use its tracking equipment to find the thing. Security at the silo, which would have been set up to stop an attack by armed Russian agents, is not up to stopping a small group of intellectual rabble.

Asteroid
, yet another television nail-biter that ran the same year, had Dallas as the target and its very upset residents reacting in ways that just about covered the whole emotional spectrum. The common denominator of all of the impact flicks was humans reacting to overwhelming danger. That theme goes back to the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
(although Odysseus would never have so much as thought of abandoning Ithaca to the Cyclops Polyphemus).

Astronomers are the sentinels, the ones in the planetary watchtower, who see possible catastrophe coming and heroically alert the world in much of the literature, in motion pictures, and on television, since they are the ones with the telescopes.
And unlike biologists, who create strains of deadly viruses in laboratories or find ways to kill them, and unlike physicists, who concoct terrible weapons or send people around the Solar System, astronomers' work is passive. They spend their time peering at the universe through telescopes, which is about as exciting—to those who do not understand the excitement of discovering new worlds or increasing our knowledge of ones that have already been discovered—as crocheting. That makes them the ideal people to become instant heroes—humanity's saviors—by necessarily being the first to see the potential world-ender coming.

In
Moonfall
, for example, science fiction writer Jack McDevitt has an amateur discover a new comet that is one hundred times the size of other comets and is traveling at ten times their speed, not toward Earth, for a change, but toward the Moon. That would be bad enough under ordinary circumstances, but it is infinitely worse because, when the discovery is made, no less a dignitary than the vice president of the United States is on the lunar surface about to inaugurate a just-completed moon base. Having been alerted, scientists study the situation and conclude that, in less than five days, the comet will crash into the Moon, shattering it into large fragments that will rain down on Earth, causing killer storms and other calamities. Hence the book's title:
moonfall
, as in rainfall and snowfall. The comet is finally nudged off course with barely hours to spare by intrepid spacemen and spacewomen.

If there were an award for the most bizarre and improbable end-of-Earth story, a two-part television series called
Impact
, which aired in Canada and in the United States in 2009, would be top contender. During the worst meteor shower in ten thousand years, a “rogue” asteroid hidden in the meteors hits the Moon with such force that it and part of the Moon are shot to Earth, where they penetrate the atmosphere and impact. Damage is relatively slight, so there is relief, but that turns out to be
unwarranted because there are subtle effects, such as cellphone disruptions, odd tidal waves, and static discharges. The usual suspects—the world's leading scientists—soon conclude that the Moon itself has been changed because the asteroid that hit it was actually a brown dwarf, which is a failed star. That is, it is an object that does not have enough hydrogen mass to be a star but still manages to be something tangible. The dwarf embeds itself in the Moon with such force that the Moon is pushed out of its orbit and heads straight toward…(begins with an
E
…). The defensive unit has just thirty-nine days to get the fast-approaching monster satellite to change direction, or there will be a big splat (as Dana Mackenzie put it in his book of that name, which is about the Moon being created when an object larger than Mars hit the home planet in its formative stage with such force that it knocked off a chunk that went into permanent orbit). After an attempt to destroy the Moon with nuclear weapons fails, two of the scientists, an astronaut, and the de rigueur cosmonaut land on it, plant an electromagnetic Moon-busting device, and set it to go off after they leave. Two of them make it back to Earth, the Moon is blown in half yet again—thus saving Earth—and the cursed brown dwarf flies into the Sun, which is exactly what it deserves. The scientific community (which was overdosed on close-call fluff by that point), for the most part, ignored
Impact
, which is to say it had precious little impact on the people who really known about such things.

Cosmic collisions can provide fun and entertainment for the whole family. “Simulate the damage caused by comet and asteroid collisions with Impact: Earth!” one game maker advertises on the Internet, mentioning Chelyabinsk. “Impact: Earth! is an interactive tool that lets anyone calculate the damage a comet or asteroid would cause if it happened to collide with our planet. You can customize the size and speed of the incoming object, and then find out if mankind survives. (Usually it does.)”
³⁴
WHEW!

The situation is perhaps best explained on a “human” level by Maksim Y. Nikulin, who owns a circus in Moscow where children can have their pictures taken sitting next to a full-grown Siberian tigress named Chanel. He claimed that the sessions are safe. Besides, he said, the appearance of danger is interesting and integral to the circus arts. “People go to the circus for adrenaline…. If it appeared to be entirely safe it would not be interesting.”
³⁵

What happened over Chelyabinsk may have startled the uninformed, but it came as no surprise to astronomers, other scientists, the international space community, and just about everyone who had learned about what happened to the dinosaurs and who took that seriously. The possibility that the worst-case “event”—Doomsday—could happen because of an asteroid or a comet impact, or even that a region could be devastated, had long since gotten governments' attention and that of many ordinary people around the world who coalesced into groups dedicated to a new concept: planetary defense. Two generations that had thought a third world war, inevitably thermonuclear, would be the worst possible occurrence to be inflicted on humanity began to see and viscerally understand that nature could provide an even worse one, and not just to humanity, but to all of Earth and, therefore, to every living thing on it.

It is hard to overestimate how important the discovery at Chicxulub was. Everyone who had taken Astronomy 101 and learned about the potential world-ending violence in the universe, or who had visited a planetarium like the Hayden in New York and had gotten to see and touch a cold, hard, scarred meteor or a fragment of one, could sense what horrific destruction a large-enough impactor could cause. They could sense the carnage emotionally but could not imagine it clearly since it would be so massive that it was beyond clear conception. And catastrophic impacts, real and potential, were by no means only
ancient history, relegated to
Tyrannosaurus rex
,
Stegosaurus
,
Allosaurus
,
Pterodactylus
, and the other creatures that disappeared when the light went out. The morning newspaper and the evening news carried stories of attacks on the planet, as they had for years. It was only a matter of noticing the evidence and establishing a pattern for the bombardment; of connecting the proverbial dots.

A “meteor shower” started over New York City on November 15, 1859, and lasted well into 1860 as fascinated New Yorkers watched the spectacular, panoramic sky show. On August 13, 1930, three meteors exploded over the upper Amazon with such force that hundreds of miles of jungle were set ablaze and continued to burn for months, covering the surviving trees in a vast area with a blanket of white ash and sending indigenous tribes fleeing in terror. On June 24, 1938, one estimated to have weighed 450 tons blew up roughly twelve miles above Chicora, Pennsylvania, and caused one apparent fatality: a cow. On August 3, 1963, a large bolide, which is loosely defined as a fireball, was detected 1,100 kilometers west-southwest of the Prince Edward Islands. On September 17, 1966, it was Lake Huron's turn when something exploded with a force equivalent to 0.6 kilotons of TNT over that body of water, which separates the state of Michigan and the province of Ontario, Canada. The Canadians got another one about five months later when a second meteor blew up thirteen kilometers above Alberta. The so-called Marshall Islands Fireball on February 1, 1994, was a double explosion that occurred with a force of eleven kilotons of TNT. That one was seen by an ambiguously named US military Defense Support Program 647 satellite, whose infrared eyes were designed to spot Soviet ballistic-missile tests and the hundreds of simultaneous hot spots that would have signaled an all-out missile attack and, therefore, the start of World War III.
¹
There was an airburst caused by three breakups 150 kilometers south of Greenland on December 12, 1997.

Walt Whitman was so taken by comets and that long meteor shower over New York that he rhapsodized about them in a poem he called “Year of Meteors (1859–60)” that was in
Leaves of Grass
:

Nor the comet that came unannounced out of the north, flaring in heaven;

Nor the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and clear, shooting over our heads,

(a moment, a moment long, it sailed its balls of unearthly light over our heads,

Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)
²

Giotto's fresco
The Star of Bethlehem
shows a comet that some say is Halley's and that Giotto apparently interpreted as having spiritually religious significance. Van Gogh's
Starry Night
is a depiction of rather violent heavenly motion that is very likely cometary, and Charles Piazzi Smyth, who was an astronomer, portrayed the Great Comet of 1843 in a painting of that name that had a long, elegant tail that stretched diagonally across the entire canvas. There is also a dramatic engraving of the same comet passing over Paris. But it was interpreted, as the appearance of comets often are, as having a sinister side, as well; of heralding impending disaster. That notion was spread by William Miller, a Bible-thumping, former Long Island farmer in Hampton, New York, who was a captain in the army during the War of 1812 and who fell off the back of a wagon and landed on his head. Then he began having delusions that Earth would be destroyed by fire in 1843, when Christ would appear and raise the believers before the planet was purified by fire. Miller was convinced that when the comet appeared, it would signal the beginning of the transformation. Prophet Miller had some fifty thousand true believers.
³
Arthur C. Clarke may very well have had the Millerites (as they were called) in mind when he described The Reborn's trying to sabotage the mission to head off Kali in
The Hammer of God
.

There were many others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, who did not find asteroids and comets romantic or the heralds of paradise everlasting. Religious or secular, they looked at the record of destruction and decided to organize to learn as much as possible about the phenomenon and, in so doing, perhaps prevent more devastation, at least on a large scale. And the religious among them believed, and continue to believe, that the supreme being who created this world wants it and its inhabitants to survive and thrive, not demolished in a colossal explosion or disappear in an all-consuming fire. They decided that the only rational way to address the danger was to understand it, confront it, and create a protective system that included private organizations, governments, and, eventually, an international alliance to protect the planet.

What happened over Tunguska was well known within the world science community and so was what occurred over Brazil in 1930 and elsewhere, including Chicora, British Columbia in March 1965, Lake Huron that same year, and Chelyabinsk, which took its first hit in April 1944. Those “events” ratified the discovery at Chicxulub, and common knowledge about what happened to the dinosaurs did indeed make the situation seem like Russian roulette, with five chambers in the revolver being empty and the sixth containing a bullet that could end it all forever. The risk that near-Earth objects (NEOs) pose is usually perceived as a function of both the culture and the science of human society. “NEOs have been understood differently throughout history,” Luis Fernández Carril, a Mexican climatologist, has written. Every time an NEO is seen, “a different risk was posed, and throughout time that risk perception has evolved. It is not just a matter of scientific knowledge.” The perception of risk is therefore “a product of religious belief, philosophic principles, scientific understanding, technological capabilities, and even economical resourcefulness.”
⁴

People did indeed bring their own beliefs, principles, and
scientific understanding to the subject. But the common denominator was the amalgamation of knowledge about what did in the dinosaurs, what happened at Tunguska, the discovery at Yucatan and of other craters all over the place, and the sightings of flaming objects all over the world. That caused deep concern among many organizations, including the national space programs, and among informed individuals, many of whom coalesced into organizations that were specifically dedicated to addressing the impact threat and all its ramifications. It galvanized thousands of individuals who, out of concern for the long-term safety of their planet, expanded their worldview beyond politics, economics, and traditional international relations. Preventing the end of the world and, in turn, the end of human existence—no great-grandchildren; no descendants at all; oblivion—became the ultimate, most consequential cause. In Samuel Johnson's immortal words, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is going to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

It certainly concentrated the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's collective mind. The threat comes from space, and as the nation's space agency, NASA had to meet that threat by taking on planetary defense. The glory days of the Apollo program were two decades old, its imaginative Skylab program was a fading memory, and Solar System exploration was drying up in the wake of the sensational Pioneer and Voyager missions of the 1970s. Its participation in constructing the International Space Station (ISS) starting in 1998 was a shared, distant, and somewhat embarrassing goal. What haunted NASA (but was never talked about in public) was the fact that the ISS was built as a long-duration training vehicle so that astronauts, cosmonauts, and spacemen and spacewomen from other nations could form an international partnership and practice for the eventual trip to Mars, which is a year each way, and have physicians, psychologists, and others see how they reacted physically,
mentally, and emotionally to so long a stint in space. The Mars mission was always elusively theoretical—a brew of fact and fiction that was equal parts Wernher von Braun and Robert A. Heinlein. It was part of a grand program called Constellation in which astronauts were to return to the Moon and others were to head for Mars, which a succession of robotic spacecraft, the latest being Curiosity, have carefully scouted. But with pressing needs on Earth and a budget deficit of $1.29 trillion (the second highest ever), President Barak Obama cancelled Constellation—aborted it, as they say in spaceworld—in 2010. Given the nation's pressing needs, including paying off wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and maintaining the armed forces (while warily watching China expand its sphere of military influence), sending people back to the Moon and then to Mars was seen as being frivolous. (For their part, China's leaders once proclaimed that they intended to send taikonauts to the Moon in an evident effort to demonstrate that their country was a superpower that was up to that task, but then they quietly abandoned the plan, no doubt because they decided that the price of the ticket was not worth the trip.)

There was nothing frivolous about the asteroid and comet threat, though. So that pivotal year—1998—NASA established the Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to coordinate the detection, tracking, and characterization (that is, the size, shape, weight, and composition) of the potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that prowled the neighborhood. Behemoths that can cause extinctions are rare and tend to turn up roughly once a century, whereas most NEOs are relatively small. But so is a bomb that can demolish a house.

“These are objects that are difficult to detect because of their relatively small size but are large enough to cause global effects if one hit the Earth,” explained Don Yeomans, the JPL astrophysicist who became the Near-Earth Object Program
Office's first director and who would write an informative and digestible primer on the situation,
Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them before They Find Us
, that ought to be required reading at every university on the planet. The book's importance extends beyond explaining the potential danger to lay people because, in addition to its technical responsibilities, the NEO Program Office is supposed to facilitate communication between the astronomers and other scientists who would have to deal with a potentially calamitous approaching asteroid or comet and a public that would range from being utterly ignorant and oblivious to being hysterical. Yeomans bridged that chasm with
Near-Earth Objects
, which amounts to a briefing manual that is very important for making clear what a collision or another very near miss would mean to Earth. The other mission NASA was ordered to take on in that fateful year of 1998, of course, was compiling the Spaceguard Survey—the catalog—within a decade, which it did.

A planetary “hanging” (to use that metaphor) concentrated Maj. Lindley N. Johnson's mind, too. Johnson was a US Air Force officer who invented the term
planetary defense
in a white paper he wrote in 1993 for the Air University SpaceCast 2020 study to determine what capabilities the air force should have in the post–Cold War world. The paper,
Preparing for Planetary Defense: Detection and Interception of Asteroids on Collision Course with Earth
, began with the assumption that a defensive system was definitely required and then made the point that the necessary technologies, including nuclear explosives, missile propulsion systems, guidance, and targeting, were effectively Cold War surplus and were therefore available. And since the threat is global, he added, the expense of operating the system should be shared by many nations. “The cost for such a system, which might be analogous to buying life insurance, also rightly belongs in the international arena,” he wrote. The clear implication was that, given the consequences of a lack of
defense against impactors, the expense would be inconsequential.
⁵
“What's your life worth?” was the unstated but clearly implied question.