Asteroids

When Audrey Jean Knauer, a woman from Kentucky, died in 1997, she shocked her family by leaving over $300,000 to actor Charles Bronson. Knauer had never actually met Bronson and was merely a huge fan of his work.

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In the 1960s, the Beatles attempted to obtain the film rights to The Lord of the Rings. The band reportedly wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct the movie, and planned on John Lennon playing Gollum, while Paul McCartney hoped to play Frodo. Their plans never came to fruition because J.R.R. Tolkien refused to give the band the rights to adapt his novel.

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The current disorder in America might seem encouraging to its enemies. But one could worry that a canny politician in the U.S. might be happy to be challenged by an international opponent with the hopes the challenge could be used to rally and unify the country. Dangerous times.

Asteroids

In September of 2022 NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. A new set of five papers in Nature has now demonstrated that not only did NASA hit its target, but the mission was also a success in diverting the asteroid:

DART, a spacecraft the size of a golf cart, collided with a Great Pyramid-sized asteroid called Dimorphos. The impact caused the asteroid’s orbit around another space rock to shrink — Dimorphos now completes an orbit 33 minutes faster than before the impact, researchers report in Nature.

…As DART hurtled towards Dimorphos at more than 6 kilometers per second, the first part that hit was one of its solar panels, which smashed into a 6.5-meter-wide boulder. Microseconds later, the main body of the spacecraft collided with the rocky surface next to the boulder — and the US$330-million DART shattered to bits….the spacecraft hit a spot around 25 meters from the asteroid’s center, maximizing the force of its impact….large amounts of the asteroid’s rubble flew outwards from the impact. The recoil from this force pushed the asteroid further off its previous trajectory. Researchers estimate that this spray of rubble meant Dimorphos’ added momentum was almost four times that imparted by DART.

…Although NASA has demonstrated this technique on only one asteroid, the results could be broadly applicable to future hazards…if a dangerous asteroid were ever detected heading for Earth, a mission to smash into it would probably be able to divert it away from the planet.