(Opinion) Imagine a celestial David having to muscle an asteroidal Goliath away from its path towards a catastrophic collision with earth.
While Hollywood has never been at a loss for Armageddon scenarios, none of them could touch what along with millions of other earthlings, I was treated to Monday night.
It was a rehearsal of what could justly be called the real space thing, the beginning of a new era.
To describe it as remarkable, watching the DART spacecraft get closer and closer and then crash at 14,000 miles per hour into a point seven million miles away, a point chosen years ago, was breathtaking and unforgettable.
Saving our planet wasn’t a nuclear bomb, blowing up an asteroid hurtling towards earth at the last second. Scientists delight in explaining why that wouldn’t work. What’s needed they might say, paraphrasing T.S. Eliot, is not a bang but a nudge.
In total fascination, I watch this intentional crash of NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) refrigerator-sized spacecraft, having traveled at 14,000 miles per hour since last November straight into Dimorphos, a small asteroid moon orbiting a larger space rock, Didymos.
As NASA explains, this is intended to be a self-driving suicidal spacecraft, guiding itself to its own demise. And it did so without a hitch.
To someone as Sci-Fi impressionable as I am, the experience of watching this from a safe distance would be hard to be bettered.
That’s especially true remembering that according to the NASA nerds if something the size of tiny Didymos (less than nine football fields in diameter) hit Earth, it could demolish half a continent.
An asteroid crash into earth is generally thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs which roamed our planet.
Preventing this from happening again, sometime in the future is what this serious celestial theater is all about.
NASA calls it the first planetary defense test. The task of discovering how to nudge an incoming asteroid from its path toward earth just enough so it slips by without mishap takes my breath away.
So does the fact that we were able to move a celestial body for the first time.
Fearful that viewers might panic as they did in 1938 when H.G. Wells radio fantasy broadcast of ‘War of The Worlds’ told listeners that Martians had landed, NASA was careful to frequently repeat there was no asteroid danger.
For the engineers and others at the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, like the rest of us, they could only bite their nails and wait and see if their DART would hit the bullseye.
Designed as a ‘proof-of-principle’ mission, a realistic demonstration that hitting an incoming asteroid with a projectile can nudge it into a different orbit and guide it out of harm’s way was a smashing success.
Waiting for the mission’s result, Dr. Elena Adams, the DART mission systems engineer, voiced a spectacular understatement with great confidence.
She said: “It is really hard to hit a very little object in space, and we’re going to do it.”
One of the exciting things I recently wrote about was the successful launching of the James Webb telescope which has been beaming fantastic pictures from its lonely perch, a million miles out in space.
Along with its predecessors, its eye was set to be trained on the moment of impact, promising stunning pictures.
DART must shave 73 seconds off Dimorphos’ orbital period to be considered successful. Some scientists are betting that 10 minutes might even be possible. It has been an awesomely fascinating first test.
It will be up to a month or two before we know for sure whether DART’s crash into Dimorphos will have changed its orbit sufficiently to prove that we could protect earth by nudging incoming asteroids with rockets.
Telescopes around the world will be watching the timing of the eclipses when Dimorphos goes in front of Didymos, the measure of success.
Said one of the scientists: “Within a few days or weeks, we would see that those eclipses start happening off-schedule. I personally would be surprised if a month went by, and we did not have a clear detection of that change. But we can’t say exactly.”
Celestial David has had a winning evening, and it looks like he might just be able to keep Goliath out of our patch.