ENTERTAINING and a bit worrying at the same time, the movie Don’t Look Up defied critics and broke Netflix’s record for the most hours viewed in a single week on the global TV platform at the start of the year.
It tells the story of astronomy graduate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a “planet killer” comet that will impact Earth in just over six months.
The movie’s rogue comet could be anything – climate change, new viruses, global war, attempts to overthrow a legitimate democracy – and the scientists are essentially alone
with their knowledge, ignored and gas-lighted by society, and ridiculed by the media.
The film is both amusing and terrifying in equal measure, conveying uncomfortable cold truths and demonstrating how hard it is to break through prevailing norms.
Above all, it perfectly captures humanity’s apparent capacity for denying the blindingly obvious, the absurdity of an economic system which puts profit above survival of life on earth, a crass political class, and a superficial mainstream media more concerned with show biz stars and ratings.
Don’t Look Up is most definitely a movie for our time. And do hang around to watch all the credits as there are some interesting bits right at the very end!
In real life, the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) - a
state-of-the-art asteroid detection system operated by the University
of Hawaiʻi (UH) Institute for Astronomy (IfA) for the agency’s Planetary
Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) - reached a new milestone in February by
becoming the first survey capable of searching the entire dark sky every
24 hours for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a future impact
hazard to Earth.
Now involving four telescopes, ATLAS has
expanded its reach to the southern hemisphere from the two existing
northern-hemisphere telescopes on Haleakalā and Maunaloa in Hawai’i to
include two additional observatories in South Africa and Chile.
“An
important part of planetary defence is finding asteroids before they
find us, so if necessary, we can get them before they get us” said Kelly
Fast, NEO Observations Program Manager for NASA’s
Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
“With the addition of
these two telescopes, ATLAS is now capable of searching the entire dark
sky every 24 hours, making it an important asset for NASA’s continuous
effort to find, track, and monitor NEOs.”
Each
of the four ATLAS telescopes can image a swath of sky 100 times larger
than the full Moon in a single exposure. The completion of the two final
telescopes, which are located at Sutherland Observing Station in South
Africa and El Sauce Observatory in Chile, enable ATLAS to observe the
night sky when it is daytime in Hawai‘i.
To date, the ATLAS
system has discovered more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets,
along with detection of 2019 MO and 2018 LA, two very small asteroids
that actually impacted Earth.
The system is specially designed
to detect objects that approach very close to Earth - closer than the
distance to the Moon, about 240,000 miles away. On 22 January,
ATLAS-Sutherland in South Africa discovered its first NEO, 2022 BK, a
100 m asteroid that poses no threat to Earth.
The addition of
the new observatories to the ATLAS system comes at a time when the
agency’s Planetary Defense efforts are on the rise.
NASA’s Double
Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) - the world’s first full-scale mission
to test a technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid
impacts - launched last November will deflect a known asteroid, which is
not a threat to Earth, to slightly change the asteroid’s motion in a
way that can be accurately measured using ground-based telescopes.
Additionally,
work on the agency’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO
Surveyor) is underway after receiving authorisation to move forward into
Preliminary Design.
Once complete, the infrared space telescope will expedite the agency’s ability to discover and characterise most of the potentially hazardous NEOs, including those that may approach Earth from the daytime sky.
