NASA's real-life "Don't Look Up"

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.

Bright lights in the sky

The Chelyabinsk asteroid over Russia in February 2013.

THERE'S been significant worldwide media interest in tomorrow morning’s flyby of asteroid 2012 TC4, which will make an unusually close pass to Earth at a distance of just 43,780 km -  that’s well inside the orbit of the Moon and closer than some satellites.

"We know the orbit of TC4 well enough to be absolutely certain that it won't hit Earth," assures Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California,"but we haven't established its exact path just yet."

The chunk of space rock is about as big (in the range of 10-20 m diameter) as the famous 2013 Chelyabinsk object which hit Earth without warning as the sun  rose over Russia’s Ural mountains on 15 February 2013.

As the space rock skimmed into the atmosphere the early morning sky lit up with a second ‘sun’ as shock waves shattered windows in hundreds of buildings around the wakening city.

It had impacted Earth literally ‘out of the blue’, flying in from the direction of the sun where no telescope could see it - and it took everyone by surprise.

Years later, meteorite hunters are still finding pieces of the ‘Chelyabinsk asteroid’ that rained down after its 17 m-wide body disintegrated in the atmosphere.

The difference with 2012 TC4, which could be up to 30 m wide, is that NASA knows it's coming. At 07:41 CEST (Central European Summer Time) tomorrow morning (12 October) it will pass 43,500 km above Earth’s surface, about 1/8th the distance to the Moon.

The flyby is so close, gravity will significantly alter the asteroid's trajectory before it exits the Earth-Moon system.

To get a better handle on the asteroid's orbit (and possible future encounters), an international network of telescopes will monitor 2012 TC4 as it speeds by.

Pinging the asteroid with its Goldstone telescope, NASA also hopes to learn much about the space rock's physical properties.

This asteroid is too small to see with the naked eye. However, skilled amateur astronomers using small telescopes will be able to observe it. At peak brightness, 2012 TC4 will shine like a 13th magnitude star as it zips through the constellations Capricornus and Sagittarius.

The house-sized space rock does afford space agencies across the globe an opportunity to test some of their planetary defence scenarios that might be needed if Earth was in the path of a more dangerous asteroid.

If an asteroid the size of TC4 or slightly bigger was on course to hit a populated area, agencies such as the ESA and NASA would look to warn people and work with relevant governments to potentially start an evacuation.

If anything signifcantly bigger the TC4 is ever detected, much more drastic action might be needed, including the possibility of trying to deflect any such asteroid before it collides with Earth.

Arizona asteroid explosion

The explosion of a small asteroid over Arizona in the early hours of 2 June is a timely reminder of the unseen and sometimes unpredicable threat facing our planet.

The asteroid hit Earth's atmosphere at around 4 am local time and the airburst cause by its explosion shook the ground below and produced a flash of light 10 times  brighter than a full Moon. NASA described as a three metre wide space rock that originated from beyond the orbit of Mars.

Shortly after the explosion, Mike Lerch walked out the front door of his house in Phoenix on the way to work. "At first I thought it was a rocket launch," he says. "Now I realise it was debris from the asteroid."

The smoke trail remains shown clearly in his picture below were widely visible as they twisted in the winds high above Arizona.

Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office says this is the brightest fireball detected in the eight-year history of NASA's All Sky Fireball Network, an array of cameras that monitors fireball activity across the USA.

The flash itself was so bright, it briefly turned night into day, graphically illustrated in these before, during, and after shots captured by one of the NASA cameras in Sedona, Arizona. The camera was facing NE so it did not record the asteroid itself.

The fact that the explosion blinded most cameras that saw it initially complicated analysts' efforts to pinpoint the asteroid’s nature and origin. Ultimately, however, they were able to draw firm conclusions - the mass of the asteroid was some tens of tons and it exploded with a kinetic energy of approximately 10 kilotons.

"There are no reports of any damage or injuries -just a lot of light and few sonic booms," says Cooke. "If Doppler radar is any indication, there are almost certainly meteorites scattered on the ground north of Tucson.”

Dangers posed by asteroids impacting Earth was one of the topics discussed at the 4th Manfred Lachs International Conference on Conflicts in Space and the Rule of Law held in Montreal, Canada, the weekend before.

Comets and asteroids colliding with Earth pose a serious threat to humanity yet we lack effective means to discover them and alert the public to imminent dangers. Even the impact of a small celestial body may lead to serious loss of life, significant material and ecological damage.

For more information see 'Protecting Earth from cosmic disasters' in the spring 2016 edition of 'ROOM - The Space Journal'.