Alex Cullen on asteroids
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Just imagine: You’re walking your dog, going for a jog, driving to mum’s place or having a coffee and reading the paper. You’re thinking about what you might have for lunch. Perhaps you’re thinking about ringing that bloke or girl you met on the weekend and asking them out. Perhaps you’re thinking about that dress you bought, took it home, and realised it really wasn’t you and questioned why the heck you bought it in the first place.
You see we tend to think of number one and all that happens in the little part of the world in which we live. I’m thinking how I’m going to get to guitar practice this afternoon before I’m thinking about Greece’s debt crisis.
As you pull that soggy tennis ball from your dog’s mouth before throwing it for the 237th time I’ll bet the last thing you’re thinking of is a giant asteroid landing flat on top of you and destroying everything for hundreds of kilometres in every direction. Just imagine. Whammo!
There’s no ‘what the bloody hell was that’?! In one fraction of a second that ‘bloody thing’ has drastically altered life on this planet as we know it or just completely destroyed it. I’d never thought of it. That was until I met Don Yeomans at the NASA Laboratories in Los Angeles, California.
Don Yeomans is like the father of that friend we all have who’s cool but nerdy, super smart and would help change your grandmother’s tyre on the side of a busy road. He works for NASA and is in charge of tracking asteroids. In between chats about his dream to come to Australia, what he told us could mean there won’t be an Australia to come to.
The aptly named 2005 YU55 is not the latest cleaning robot to come out of Japan. Nor is it a new character on Doctor Who. It just happens to be the painfully unromantic name of an asteroid that’s hurtling through the solar system and its coming scarily close to us. I’ll admit the chance of this jet-plane sized rock hitting us is slim but so is winning the lottery and we hear about people doing that all the time.
On Wednesday 2005 YU55 will pass between Earth and the moon. It probably won’t hit us but the scary thing is there are nearly 20,000 others just like it that possibly could. Some are a kilometre in diameter and if one of those hits Earth, its curtains for civilisation. The more I talked with Don, the more I realised that not enough thought is going towards just what we do when we’re in a large asteroid’s crosshairs. Don’s doing all he can, sure, but jeez he needs help.
One of the front lines of Asteroid Watch is in the Catalina Mountains near Tuscon, Arizona. It’s cold, dry, windy and very, very high up and is the perfect place for Ed Beshore to keep an eye on our part of the solar system. He’s another nice super smart bloke who’s ultimately tasked with a small matter of saving the world. His telescopes spot up to 70 percent of new asteroids. The observatory hasn’t received much attention since the 70’s and is anything but comfortable. The monitors and machines reminded me of an 80’s sci-fi movie complete with what looked like a Commodore 64 and faded bright orange chairs.
A member of Ed’s team sits in this room below a giant telescope every day and every night watching the sky and beyond. He calmly explained that there is a chance his team won’t spot that large asteroid and we could have less than a day to prepare for a life-altering collision. One actually did sneak through. Luckily it was only three metres in diameter and hit the desert in Sudan. Just imagine.
And just when you thought the news couldn’t get any better, well, it doesn’t. Apophis sounds much more menacing than 2005 YU55. Apophis gives me visions of a big gold-sprayed God on a chariot with snorting horse nostrils and leather and shining, chinking metal. It gives the impression of being dangerous and rather evil and that’s because it is.
Information about viewing the object from Australia
At a small office in Los Angeles Dr Bruce Betts is chatting to his secretary. There’s a piece of space junk in a display cabinet and a few other NASA tidbits which I can’t help but have a closer look at. Bruce is younger than Don and Ed remembers when man first walked on the moon. He tells me the chances of a big asteroid hitting Earth is 100 percent, the question is simply when.
That asteroid could be the 400 metre wide Apophis. There’s a chance Apophis could pass through a key-hole in space about a kilometre wide and if it does, our gravitational pull could put it on a collision course with us, due on our front doorstep in 2036. If it does hit, it means death to millions and now the question is how do we stop it? No one really knows. There are ideas but nothing concrete and nowhere near enough money is being thrown at it.
So as you walk your dog, turn the light out to go to sleep or walk home from the bus stop, spare a thought for Ed Beshore and his team perched in that little observatory in the Arizona desert on guard against the sky. Spare a thought for the bloke tasked with what to do when one of these asteroids does decide to come our way. There are people who are building doomsday underground bunkers that will service thousands of people. It will allow people to live underground for up to three years with food, water, accommodation even entertainment while up above, our world is no longer. That’s another story for another time but just imagine.
