Armageddon told us to nuke it. NASA told us to hit it with a spacecraft in the DART mission. Which option is better? (Hint: Not the one that kills our planet anyway.)
(Warning: this post contains spoilers for Armageddon.)
Hey, this is Taizo, and welcome back to Astrocenter.
In honor of the recent successful DART mission by NASA, we'll be taking a look at Armageddon today: one of the classic (and sometimes laughable) examples of sci-fi action movies.
First of all, what is the DART mission? Officially the "Double-Asteroid Redirection Test",
the mission's aim was to redirect the path of an asteroid by ramming it with a spacecraft.
Sounds like something from a sci-fi movie, right?
The actual impact was probably less than what you'd expect; the mission has been compared to "ramming a golf cart into the Great Pyramids of Giza". But if it worked, it would be enough to shorten the asteroid Didymos's orbital path around a larger asteroid. And it did! According to a later NASA report, the"spacecraft’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes".
The impact was monitored closely by telescopes and scientists around the world, and even by the doomed spacecraft itself. Images were streamed by the DART spacecraft "from its DRACO camera back to Earth in real time as it approached the asteroid," according to the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory. You can see that the final image is cut off because the spacecraft got destroyed while it was still sending it.
Despite being "easily some of the smallest" telescopes to observe the mission (SETI Institute), the Unistellar citizen science network got some pretty cool photos, put together in video form here:
Now, Armageddon is pretty outlandish as far as astronomy and space science protocol go. In reality, NASA's budget to track near-Earth objects is not "one million dollars". Since its establishment in 1998, the budget has been increasing for the Center of Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, growing to $150 million by 2019.
The main plot point of the movie, of course, is how NASA would address the problem of a planet-killing asteroid. A bright US general suggests sending "150 nuclear warheads and blast that rock apart," but is immediately refuted by a classic superbrain scientist: No, no, that's much too simple and inadequate. We need to drill into the asteroid and nuke it from the inside.
A similar sentiment was echoed by my friend in an Astronomy club meeting when we were discussing the DART mission and its potential applications: "Why can't we just nuke it?" And it's a valid course of thought. Why risk messing up the calculations with redirection when you could simply obliterate any chance of danger?
The answer to this lies in a keyword: "vaporized".
Newscaster: "The two halves are gonna miss us by four hundred miles, and most of the smaller particles have been vaporized."
Vapor is when particles are in gas form, one of the three main states of matter. And if you've taken high school biology, no doubt you've heard of the concept of surface area vs. volume: the smaller an object, the larger its surface area by comparison.
Well, "vaporized" doesn't mean it's gone, does it? It's still there, just with a lot more surface area. So instead of half the world's cities being pulverized instantly by incoming asteroids, we die a slow and painful death from an invisible blanket of radioactive dust spreading over the Earth.
Obviously, NASA astrophysicists have figured this out and are working on alternate ways to deter asteroid collisions, hence the DART mission. Although exploding an asteroid to save the day would be pretty cool indeed, unfortunately, we can't resort to such extreme measures if we want to preserve life as we know it on this planet.
That's all for today. Thanks for reading, and I'll catch you in the next one!
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Other works about near-Earth objects:
Bibliography
Unistellar Citizen Science Network successfully captures Dart impact. SETI Institute. (n.d.). Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.seti.org/unistellar-citizen-science-network-successfully-captures-dart-impact
Bardan, R. (2022, October 11). NASA confirms Dart Mission Impact Changed Asteroid's motion in space. NASA. Retrieved October 25, 2022, from https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space
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