Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At
7/14/202637 min
You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destructive forces ever to hit Earth, yielding mass extinctions (and the moon). And yet! Of all the possible dooms this show has explored so far, asteroids may be the one humanity is closest to beating.
Ben Bradford explores why — and traces how — including the astronomers who first grasped the threat, the questionable Hollywood solutions of Deep Impact and Armageddon, and a zany but very real plan to seek out dangerous space rocks, and punch them.
Guest: Cristina Thomas, professor at Northern Arizona University and leader of the DART Observations Working Group
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Ben Bradford· Host0:14
[comet whooshing] The comet had lived billions of years. It held its shape, ice, rock, dust, while planets and stars lived and died in the distance. One day, the comet drifted [comet whooshing] a little too close to the sun, whose gravity caught it. Ice boiled, a tail bloomed, pulled into closer orbit. The comet was stuck circling our star, a carousel it couldn't escape, for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, until a few decades ago. It passed Jupiter, the gas giant with a huge gravity well of its own. Jupiter now imprisoned our comet, drew it so close to the planet it briefly skimmed the outer atmosphere. That broke it into pieces. Like a string of beads, the broken comet stretched out over the planet, circling it still, but now in a death spiral. And that's when we saw it on Earth, in 1993. Humans had the temerity to name the ancient comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, after the astronomers who first spotted it, and one year later, telescopes around the world excitedly trained