Bad Universe (2010) s01e01 Episode Script
Asteroid Apocalypse
Yeah, smells like mass extinction.
So, massive asteroid is bearing down to the Earth.
We are talking about millions of lives.
People could die.
This is the real thing.
We are gonna try to save the Earth here.
We all seen asteroids destroy in Hollywood movies.
But would that actually work? We're gonna put it to the test.
I wanna model an asteroid impact.
I need a big explosion.
It helps to know what this thing is made of.
We need to find the an answer, now.
Because, this may mean the difference between life on Earth and no life at all.
The Universe is a dangerous place.
Threats can coming from any direction.
But pop culture is play fast and useful defense.
In quiet often, the things we think we know are all wrong and when you deal with the Universe, the ignorance can be deadly.
That's where I come in.
I'm Phil Plait.
I'm astronomer on the mission.
My job is the debunk all the junk science out there in pursuit of the truth.
In the next hour, we're gonna to show you the real science behind the mysteries of this planet.
Our solar system in the bad Universe we all live in.
It's just may save your life.
Phil Plait's BAD UNIVERSE It begins with the flash in the sky.
Blinded by the sun, observatories don't pick it up until the last moment.
It comes in fast.
As it bears down, there's barely time to sound it alert before the stadium size asteroids slams in the city at nearly 4 and half million people.
And when it's done, all the remains of Sydney, Australia, is a burning crater.
Now, I have some bad news for you.
This scenario is 100 percent, guarantee rock solid bet the house going to happen.
An asteroid is going to hit the Earth.
Maybe is city, maybe is your city.
The questions are when, how big, where and can we stop it.
This the kind of predictions are make the scientist lose their hair.
But, that what predictions are.
There a big what if.
So, I'm gonna take you some place where we could see what happens when asteroid hits the Earth.
Once we see what even in a moderate size asteroid can do, I have a feeling really wanna learn how to stop one.
And the best place to go, if you dealing with a lots of energy, is EMRTC, which is an energetic materials research and testing center.
EMRTC is one of the coolest places on the planet.
It's where engineers, scientists and the military comes to blows up, just to see what happens, all in the name of science, of course.
The place is littered with tanks, missiles and stuff, I probably don't even know about .
There I'll meet with my old friend Dan Durda.
He spends his life researching asteroids and try to figure out what they made of, how they formed and what we can do we see one had it on our way.
Hey, Phil.
-Hey, Dan.
Dan been studying these things for 20 years and if you need to know how an asteroid forms a crater, he's your man.
-You're ready for some impact physics? Yes, ser.
Dan is going to help me model, just how bad the destruction could be, if even the medium size the asteroid was hurtling torch Sydney, Australia and it was no way to stop it.
What we gonna see? -Well, the first thing we gonna see is a big loud explosion.
-Yeah, I would think so.
Behind me is a truck full of scariness.
This is 7500 pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil mix, basically fertilizer and diesel mix together.
This is a 50 pound bag of this stuff.
Is an equivalent of 20 pounds of TNT.
We have 150 bags, the explosive equivalent of 3000 pounds of TNT.
All of these is going get buried into a hole and when you detonated bum.
That explosive charge is going to be a stand in for it to simulate the effects of impact crater.
If you just put the explosive on top of the ground, a lot of explosion is wasted, just going up in the air.
So, buried eight feet down, that's gonna maximize our crater extend.
We gonna have pretty awesome asteroid impact.
I think, we gonna get nice size ball shaped crater out of there.
Maybe 55, 60 feet across 15 -20 feet deep.
I cannot wait to see this.
Now, where we mimic in the impact of an asteroid using explosive, but asteroids aren't explosive.
Their destructive power comes from two things: their mass and more importantly their speed.
Together physicists call this kinetic energy and just how fast is an asteroid move? Well, let's compare it with something we can all relate to.
The speed of a bullet.
-Holy macaroni.
Look at this.
Oh, that was so cool.
-Little over a 1 km on a second.
When you fire a bullet from a rifle, it's traveling about 2000 miles on hour, about half of mile per second.
Typical asteroid impact velocity is 15 miles per second, that's thirty times faster than a rifle bullet.
Now, think about the kind of energy that is released when something moving that fast, it's something solid.
That velocity, that speed translate in the energy.
It takes a huge amount of energy to get an asteroid moving that quickly and releases the energy when it stopped and that's where the power, the real destructive power of an asteroid lies.
When the explosion goes on, the pressure way is going to expand like a sphere except the grounds on its way.
So truly it's gonna be a hemisphere, half of a sphere and as it expands its gonna get weaker.
Now in physics the relationship between the strength of that wave and its distance from the explosion itself, is call the inverse square law.
And that basically predicts that if 1 mile we're expecting a pressure 4 pounds per square inch and then 2 miles we should get 1 pound per square inch.
Now, the inverse square law should be pretty accurate predictor, but we also wanna see what happens with our own eyes.
This is a pressure detector, it's called a Bikini gauge.
It's named after the Bikini's explosion of the hydrogen bomb test in 1950.
This big circle will pop when is near about 1 pound per square inch pressure on it.
As they get smaller takes more pressure to pops them.
Here would roughly 4 pounds per square inch.
That's enough to actually damage your ear drums.
And if these little guys are popped, that's give you basically internal organ damage.
Yeah, right here is about right.
The icons of Sydney, Australia, are the opera house and the Harbour bridge.
We designed are impact at 40:1 scale and this mark buildings will help show us the effect of even a moderate asteroid hit.
You like my stunt double? I have some bad news.
This is a suicide mission.
You're not gonna make it, but we appreciate your dedication to the cause of science and explosive things.
All good? We also get nine cameras rolling on this thing.
So, we're gonna catch up from every angle in distance and in super slow motion.
So, you're gonna press the button? Unless you want to? -I'd love to.
I'm gonna push the button.
Everybody is ready? Here we go.
Three, two, one.
Holy haleakala.
-Look, what I just did.
Twenty seconds later debris was still falling.
That was amazing.
The bunker shudder, you can feel it, pushing to the side.
It was like an earthquake.
It's fantastic.
-Classic classic impact cratering physics going on here.
-Well, let's go to do some field geology.
-Yeah, I think so.
Great.
See, what we got here.
-Yeah.
Holy haleakala.
Oh, man.
You can see raze that happened on the Moon.
It's where the ejected comes out in this clumps collapse.
Let's go little bit closer.
First stop, my stunt double.
He looks pretty intact.
I mean, there is not even a lot of debris damage.
I don't think, that this is saying that is safe to be 2 miles from explosion.
In fact, if you watch the footage frame by frame, you can see the shock wave blasted into the dummy.
Let's take a more scientific look at the shock wave.
On the slow move camera, you can actually see the pressure wave that is expands.
But, what will are Bikini gauges tell us about how survivable this shock wave really was.
Oh, look at that.
Yeah, this were been a really sucky place to stand.
Just inside the two mile limit, trees are being blown down by the blast.
There is basically no surviving anything like this.
Your organs would be destroyed.
You would be basically turn in the karige cheese in cased by your own skin.
First degree raining down here that the scale would be two or three yards across.
So, imagine the cars raining down like in a disaster movie explosion where cars are falling from the sky.
So, if the initial blast didn't kill you, which it would and the sound way passing you by didn't kill you, which it would and if the hit didn't kill you, which it would, I imagine, something the size of the apartment building falling from the sky.
This is a fifteen storey apartment building right here.
Yeah, this is a part of the bridge.
It didn't quite make it, did it? There is Sydney Opera house.
The fat lady has sunk.
And then this.
Holy haleakala.
Look at this.
There is anything that should let you know that we have to stop this thing from happening.
We are standing on the revers right now.
All right, let's go in.
One, two, three.
Even from up there you can't tell how deep it is.
This is crazy.
-Yeah.
I was guessing about, what I say, seventeen, eighteen feet seventeen, eighteen feet, what you said.
Guess what.
It's seventeen.
Phil, what you got for diameter up there? Sixty four feet.
It's basically what we predicted.
For all of that power and all of that devastation, this crater was caused by an object had a been an asteroid impact, that would be about this big.
Incredibly, an object the size of a beach ball could of made this crater.
In since our experiment was done to scale, that means that the real asteroid striking Sydney, would a been 40 times larger.
And the crater in real life would a been a half mile wide by the eight of the mile deep.
Pretty devastating to poor Sydney.
It's named is Apophis.
We know it's coming.
We even know the date it could hit.
But is there anything we can do to stop it? So far, we demonstrated the destructive potential of an asteroid impact.
Now let's look at the obvious question, are we in any imminent danger? Asteroids and comets are left over debris from formation of the solar system 4 and half billions years ago.
And all that stuff is still floating out there.
And you are slamming into that stuff, to the tune of hundred tons of material every night.
That's enough to fill a ten storey building every month.
But most of us don't notice this light show, because world is huge and as the whole thing is spread out over ten of millions square miles.
Now, the wide produce of surveillance cameras has given us a better view of this spectacular impacts.
Spectacular that is until one hits you.
In 1490, Chinese astronomers reported the rain of rocks falling from the sky, stoning 10.
000 people to death.
464 years later, came the first confirm report of a meteorite hitting a human.
When its great big size rock, punch through the roof of the home Van Hodges, amazingly she escaped with just the bruise to her leg.
But the ants are working against us.
Every few hundred years, we were hit by something really large, like football field size, definitely big enough to take out the city.
But the ones they give me night mares, the ones that truly scare me are the asteroid that can cause what scientists call, an extinction level event.
Forget just Sydney, we are talking an asteroid big enough to wipe us all out.
Thinking can't happen? Think again.
This hillside is a timeline of the Earth's history.
Let me show you something cool.
Come with me.
Ah, here we go.
This is the K-T boundary.
The K-T boundary is geological dividing line between Earth's Cretaceous and tertiary periods.
Now, if you look right here from here on down, dinosaurs and very few mammals.
And you look up from here going up and there no dinosaurs and mammals taking over, which means at whatever happens right as this point is what wipe out the dinosaurs.
Whatever happened at this thin line of rock, changed evolution in a blink of the eye and scientist now believe, that there's only one clear explanation.
65 million years ago, a six mile wide asteroid strike near what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, near Yucatan Peninsula.
It was so big, that is the bottom struck the Earth's crust, the top of the asteroid was still sticking out of the planet's atmosphere.
If you detonated every single nuclear weapon on Earth simultaneously, the dinosaur killer impact would be a million times more powerful.
The world burned and the dinosaurs along with most species on Earth, where wiped out.
In the Katy boundary we found more than enough evidence to support the asteroid theory.
For one thing it contains a relatively large amounts of iridium, an element that's rare in the Earth, but very common on asteroids.
You also find micro tektites, little tiny glass bits and that was happened when asteroid hits the Earth, compresses the sand, turns into glass and stop blast out and lens all over the Earth.
You find a lot of shocked quartz.
Quartz, that is been ram far harder than anything Earth can do, volcano it's not enough to do it.
This is our point to an asteroid origin for this layer right here.
And the Katy boundary isn't just in Yucatan Peninsula where the asteroid hit.
Geologists found the same boundary in many locations on North America, in the major ocean basins and even as far as New Zealand.
The impact was literally a worldwide event.
And the astronomer makes the hair on the back my next stand up and that's because given enough time and if we don't do anything about it, this will happen again.
The cosmic clock is ticking and it's not a matter of if but when.
We hold the fate of our species, our planet in our hands.
And if you not believe me, why don't you ask this guy.
Oh, yeah.
You can't, he's dead and if we don't do something about this threat it will be our bones standing behind me.
And when we'll come back, we will find out, if anything can be done to save the Earth from Armageddon.
Oh, I love destruction.
Let's say, tomorrow morning, the astronomer spied an asteroid the size of the building, headed right for us.
We are ready to snap in the action.
And do what exactly? That's the problem.
We don't have a plan.
We don't have a technology in place, to face this threat.
But there is something we have a lot of, nuclear weapons.
Now, all that most people know about stopping the asteroid is the way they'd seen in the movies.
You know, the brave astronauts plant a nuke on the asteroid a blow into rubble.
But would that actually work? Can you destroy an asteroid with nuclear weapon? Well, let's find out.
I'm headed back to EMRTC testing range with Dan Drta.
Dan is the leading expert in what's call asteroid mitigation, the science a preventing asteroid disasters.
Asteroids fall into four basic categories.
Porous, rocky, iron and a rubble pile, which is basically a collection of rocks.
And today, Dan and I will test, what would happen to each one, if it were hit by a nuke.
This is our gun.
We're gonna be shooting it like an asteroids worth.
It's say 40 mm cannon And it look like something like tank.
It's just about.
Just about right.
This is our porous asteroids.
This is our stand in.
This is piece of sandstone and the next thing to do is to whack this with the projectile and see what will happen.
This is our simulated nuclear weapon.
It's tiny.
-Now this is just a test and there's nothing really nuclear about this bullet.
We are just using the bullet as a standing for multimega ton nuke and a rock as a stand in for a porous asteroid.
Thank you.
In the movies, the nuke obliterates the asteroid.
Let's see what happens in real life.
Ok.
Here we go.
Three, two, one.
So, what just happened here? Your nuclear weapon did a lot of damage to this asteroid.
Holy cow.
-See? -A few big pieces, right? One big piece, two cracked and bunch of shrapnel.
Now, imagine this rock, only 2000 times larger, we hit it with the nuke and snap it on half.
Now, instead one big asteroid coming at us, we have to asteroids along with 1000 of fragments raining down to the global disaster.
If this was a real mitigation attempt on a real asteroid, this a would call un mitigation disaster.
-Yeah.
I would say, this is sort of epic fail at this point.
Right.
This is not what you want to do.
So, next I think we're gonna have to do a more solid one.
Let's go to another asteroid.
This is a rock.
Is a piece of basalt.
-There are a lot of asteroids visiting pass us all the time.
What percentage of them are like this? About half of them.
Good dense rock like this.
So, there is a fifty-fifty chance that we have to stops something it's gonna be this one.
-Yeah.
Well, let's wrack it then.
Two, one.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I loved destruction.
Come on, you got it keep up.
This is an asteroid physic time of the essence.
-We try to save the planet here.
Oh, I thought it gonna split right a part.
-No, no.
Consider it, it's much more substantial rock and it didn't do as much damage.
-For the most part the asteroid is still intact.
-These are 200 yards across.
Exactly.
Still very bad.
-That's very bad.
So, the rocky asteroid not much damage but still deadly debris.
-I'm taken a couple of pieces as souvenirs.
So, what's next? The nickel iron asteroid.
Its mass is so dense that even a small meteorite can do a tremendous damage.
It's hard to imagine, but this is a ton of steel.
About 7 percent of asteroids are like this.
About one in fifteen.
-Ready? Let's try this one.
-Yeah.
Yeah.
Three, two, one.
See what we got here.
Look at that.
It's really absorb the impact very well.
The good news from the nickel iron test no shrapnel.
The bad news, no damage either.
Which means, if we come up against one of this, we may have a hard time hitting it with anything that it will make it difference.
We've one last asteroid to try and that is the rubble pile.
A rubble pile is an asteroid that's been hit so many times by other asteroids, that's now it's just a collection of broken debris held together by its own gravity.
See, they orbiting each other.
What we got here is a bag of rocks, but in fact this is our model for a rubble pile asteroid.
Little left.
That's it.
Right there.
Good.
So, in our case this burlap sack is the gravity holding the rocks together.
When the projectile hits right here, think what's going to happen is instead of seen this things scatter, we just gonna see a mark here and the rest will get absorbed.
I think, you will be about right.
Here we go.
Three, two, one.
Yeah, well, there it go.
We are actually demonstrate precisely what we predicted.
The impact a bludarited the rock at hit, but all rest of the rubble pile really didn't even see that impact.
-Right.
Most likely, a rubble pile would just absorb a nuclear detonation.
It would be kind like a shooting a bb-gun into a pile of sand.
So, it looks like using nukes is risky and unpredictable and we'd only wanna use them as the last resort option against an asteroid that's right on top of us.
But unlike the movies there is a good chance that ain't gonna work.
-We got a remember, it' s Hollywood.
It is a movie, that's right.
One thing we have learned, if we want to use a nuke against an asteroid, we have to know in advance what that asteroids made of.
Now, is that possible? Well, sure.
We can learn a lot about what's up there by studying what we already have down here.
And that's way I'm headed to Meteoritics laboratory at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, to see what we can learn from meteorites.
Hey, Adrian.
-Welcome, Phil.
For eight years, professor Adrian Brearley, was the creator of one of the most comprehensive meteorite collections in the world.
Look at shrine to ex-terrestrial materials.
All of these meteorites are proof of how often we get hit by these things.
So we better start learning, how to stop them, now.
What I got here, is a cut slice of the very famous Allende meteorite, which fell in 1969 in Mexico.
If you are about to hit something with the hammer or even more importantly, laba bam edet, it helps to know what this thing is made of.
First, we gently cut off a small slice of the meteorite and stick it on the electron microscope.
What we found is grains, that all interlocked together.
We have an improve knowledge how strong it is.
Now, here is the coolest part of all this.
Astronomers can take what they learned in this lab and use it to find out about the composition of an asteroid, that's still floating in space.
How can they do that? Well, every type of asteroid like rock or iron, reflex the sun's radiation a little bit differently.
So, if we shine a light on meteor right in our lab and reflex that radiation back the same way as an asteroid we're looking at it in space.
-We can see, that we have a lot of silicon, a lot of iron.
That can tell us, that the meteorite we have down here, is made from the same material as the asteroid that floating around up there.
-In that's the case, we can tie a given meteorite to a given asteroid.
And that will help us if we'll see that asteroid heading for us.
If we then related to an asteroid that's coming at us say odd, this one matches what we notice about this asteroid.
It's a fine grain structure, its can hold together very well.
That means, we should do this instead of that.
That could be months of time we save and that can make a difference between this thing hitting or not.
So, that's great if we have a meteorite from a specific asteroid.
But, if it's a different asteroid, something we don't know much about, or worse a comet, then we are in trouble.
Comets.
If you thought asteroids were bad waiting to you get a load of might what happen if one of this comes our way.
By now, we know that the asteroids can really pack a punch and if we need to stop one that's headed for us, we're going to have to know much about it is possible.
But what if the object approaching us turns out not to be an asteroid at all.
What if I told you, that there was something even more dangerous out there than an asteroids, something bigger, faster, something we don't know where to look for and that can change direction on a wink.
Well, that's something is a comet.
A comet is basically a collection of debris frozen together into a big ball of cosmic ice and that ice makes a comet's movements unpredictable and deadly.
I can mimic that with the ping pong ball.
All I have to do is poke a hole in it and another one, this way.
Fill it with liquid nitrogen, which is it 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Now you can see the jets coming out here and here and with the comet that would really happens.
When this thing gets near the sun, that ice turns back into a gas and force its way out.
And then when you watch the comet it's start rolling around in all these crazy directions depending on which way those jets pointing.
And we can have a comet pass very close to the Earth and miss us except to have a jet suddenly push it into us.
And that's make comets even more dangerous than asteroids.
Remember back in 1997, when the comet Hale-Bopp streak across our skies.
Well, that comet was discovered less than two years before it pass near us and moving at 70 000 miles per hour.
If this 25 mile wide comet has change direction and headed our way, well, we wouldn't be here talking about it right now.
So, now that I scared you comes the next question.
Is there anything we can do to stop a comet? Well, to find that out we're gonna need to make a comet.
I got everything to do that right here.
So, this is gonna be a pretty good approximation.
The water is the main ingredient of comets.
I'll put it on spreads of ammonia a very common ingredient in space.
Coinsr, which will be our organics.
There are various organic compounds.
Founding comets like amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Some dirt, because there's a lots of rocks in comets and it's that carbon in it.
So, here comes the charcoal.
Comets are cold and so I need to chill this with dry ice.
There it is a frozen carbon dioxide in comets.
So, this is not entirely unrealistic.
So, just shake it up a little bit and the dry ice cost from being a solid into a gas.
Now, let's us see what we made here and we got a comet.
So, now that we got our a little scale model comet, how we can use it to figure out how to stop one of this things.
Well, comets are made from ice, right? So, if you're thinking heat, you're on the right track.
Remember, comet change direction by venting gas.
So, could we use the heat from a laser to drill a hole in a comet, making it at shut out enough gas to change direction.
Well, I just happen to have something here, that might tell us if that will work.
This is laser glows Hercules laser beam.
This is the most powerful handheld laser in the world.
Check this out.
Watch this.
That's hot.
So, we have our comet and we have our heat source.
Now, let's see if this theory holds water or in this case gas.
If this works, the heat from our laser will cause our model comet to meet a small amount of carbon dioxide.
We're doing something.
We are seeing a little bit of out gases.
But could this little jets of gas create an push to change the direction of our comet.
All right.
Let's go.
Well, let's pretend our model comet is the real thing and see if we'll be able to save Sydney from comet Armageddon.
Oh, well, so long Sydney.
So, we're gonna have to find something else and I get to say, I don't think that I'm done yet.
You know, it is occurred to me that we might missing something pretty obvious.
The sun.
This grapefruit will be our comet and this is our solar mirror.
It's called a Fresnel lens.
It gathered a huge amount of light and can focus it on one spot.
In fact, it's so bright, that I have to wear protective glasses.
So, if this will floating out in space we can use it to concentrate the sun light on a comet or asteroid just like this.
Look at that.
You can see the smoke coming up and as I get to the juice of the grapefruit you can see its sputtering out there.
Well, if you can make hot enough that material can turn into gas and shut out it would push the comet in the other direction just like a rocket blast.
It's pretty cool.
That was a fun little demonstration.
In the theory behind it is sound, but we are a long way from having the technology to make either a solar mirror or or a space laser work.
And to develop those kind of technologies is going to take time and that means we need to locate any killer rocks or comets as soon as we can.
We need to have that time to focus our effort what might be our only chance at stopping a catastrophe.
Currently NASA is already tracking an amazing 7000 nearest objects with more added every day.
So, what exactly are they doing with all this data.
Somewhere, there must be some kind of high command center, that digest and analyzes all of these information.
Some kind of NORAD for asteroid tracking.
And it turns out there is such a place.
I'm in Cambridge Massachusetts, at the Harvard & Smithsonian minor planets center.
Whenever the astronomer sees a threat in the skies, they send that information here.
The team at this nerve center analysis, processes and catalogs the data and they are always ready for the next threat from space.
Tim? Phil.
Hi.
Timothy Spahr is the director of the Minor planets center.
Could all our lives rest with just him? So, is it just you? -No, there are six people here in Minor planets.
-Six? There are six people who are handling all of this information, all of this data about objects out of space they are passing the Earth? Yes.
That's not even really enough to stuff a food restaurant.
It's pretty amazing.
-We are good people.
That makes me feel better.
It's just a half dozen people who come to the office every day and they have the fate of the world in their hands.
There's plenty of rooms for things to sneak passed us.
In order to cover the entire sky every night we have to quadruple all the number of observatories.
There also the problem that half of the objects can come from the sun side of the sky and no server detect those objects.
So, you get no warning before impact and I mean no warning at all.
Basically, the first notice we have is a flash on the sky.
Yeah and then boom.
Maybe we get 24 hours warning on a 100 meter object.
So, if we sees something that big coming in what do you do? -I don't really think we do anything.
We'd evacuate.
Yeah.
What are you do on the Sunday April 13.
2046? Well, mark your calendar, because that's the day we maybe hit by this killer rock.
So, we know that's sooner or later killer asteroid or comet is going to have Earth and its crossroads.
And right now, we may be virtually defenseless.
To have any hope to developing the technology to stop Armageddon we need advance warning what's coming and when.
And that starts with telescopes.
Telescopes like this one.
I'm high in Magdalena mountains of New Mexico, at the Magdalena ridge observatory.
The observatory operates on the watchful eyes of Eileen and Bill Ryan.
This husband and wife team has spent the last 17 years hunting for comets and asteroids that could wipe us out.
Holy Haleakala.
Look at that.
There's the telescope, Phil.
All right.
Let's fire this things up.
-Set.
Holy That's awesome.
It's 52 000 pounds.
-So, more than 27 times.
I see stars.
Holy grace.
So, now basically we'll be able opponent at some object of interest.
No the enemy.
That's our motto.
-Let's go.
So, how do you find the tiny moving object in the sky? Well, you start by looking at things they aren't moving.
This is the stars are much more distant.
They appear to us as essentially stationary.
So, we will take a series of images and we will move through them we see that we have a very clear object moving through the field.
On average might ten or twelve discovered per night.
We have to assess are they a danger, how strong are they, how big are they.
All of that work that we do can leads to predictions for when and where an object will hit.
The good news is that if one of this objects big enough and far enough away.
We have pretty decent chances detecting it with plenty with advance warning.
The bad news is that we already seen something big and it's headed for us.
The fact, it's going right through our neighborhood.
-Forget the neighborhood.
This one gonna pass right through your front door.
This is a model of a real asteroid, called Apophis.
It could be -A rubble pile.
It's a size of football stadium.
-So, it's couple of yards across.
Practically like a city block.
-And you said it comes close.
How close is close? -Let me show you.
What we have here is jet propulsion laboratories, small body database.
You can go and look up the orbits of any nearest asteroid.
Watch closely here, the closing distance between Apophis and the Earth.
Here we are 2029.
Look at that.
That's pretty close, isn't it? This thing is gonna pass so close to the Earth in 2029, it's gonna fly under the high our communication satellites.
What's happen if it hits us? An object of that size if would strike the Earth would that energy about 500 megatons.
That's 10 times larger than the largest nuclear weapon ever detonate on the face of the Earth.
And 5000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
What would happen if something like that came in over Sydney harbor? They would be no Sydney after that.
So, the goal here is to stop it.
How we do that? Three, two, one.
Remember, our test show that using the nuclear weapon is risky.
It's a last resort option against the asteroid that's already so close, that's there no other choice.
But with an asteroid like Apophis, we have years a lead time.
So, is there a better approach? Probably the best solution that we have in hand right now today something that we can actually do, is something called a kinetic impactor.
Kinetic impactor is a spacecraft fired at the distant asteroid, that in theory will actually pushed the asteroid out of the way.
If we have enough advance warning, a little push maybe all it takes to change the asteroid's course from a devastating impact to near miss.
And Dan and I were headed to the southwest research institute in Texas, to put that theory to the test.
Sorry, I hear you have a pretty big gun around here.
That we do.
-Yeah.
This is our kinetic kill spacecraft.
We gonna shut this at 2 km/seconds.
-We have our impactor, now what we need is an asteroid and it's just happen that we have one.
Yeah, smells like mass extinction.
The weighs 2700 pounds.
We gonna set the sphere down, so that the impactor would hit it straight on.
That's it.
That's a center.
-We gonna smack it as hardest we can and get all that force right into it.
We only can do that once.
Now, back in 2005, NASA did something similar with their Deep impact mission, where they slam to giant block of copper into a comet.
And while it proof that we could hit a spitting comet with a kinetic space craft, the impact itself through up so much dust, that was difficult to study the results.
So, we don't know exactly what happened.
Today we are gonna find out exactly what's going to happen.
It isn't just a force of the spacecraft hitting the asteroid that matters.
The impact also releases debris or injective which acts like the frost from the rocket, pushing the asteroid even more in opposite direction.
Shooting granite chunks out of here at one or two km/second.
That's gonna be transform.
Even more momentum.
It's more bang for your bag.
-You got it.
Look likes we gonna make a death star here.
Let's blow this thing and go home.
-Awesome.
We will find out if we deflect it an asteroid Holy haleakala.
Look at that.
or just made a bad problem even worse.
We are about to test whether our remark space probe, call the kinetic impactor, has enough power to push it an asteroid out of the way.
Now it's time to lock, load and fire.
-This is 850 g of smoke propellant.
So, almost two pounds of propellant.
-Correct.
Can I hit the button? -I wish, I could say yes, but no.
No? All right.
Here we go.
-Yeah.
Awesome.
If the impactor can push the sphere even of a fraction of an inch, the test will be a success.
We will fire on zero.
-Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
Let's go see what we got here.
-OK.
Oh, my God.
Look at that.
Holy haleakala.
Look at that.
-Look at that.
Cracked all and back to here.
-That's a 120 degrees of crack.
I'm dying to see high speed footage.
Take a pick of this.
What we got here? One? -I'm just gonna play this frame by frame at the beginning that you can see what's going on.
Start here to see that.
-Oh, projectile.
Oh, that's a projectile.
-Is not that awesome? Look.
Kick it back.
-It's what we wanted.
That's our deflection.
-Yeah, right.
Not only that we strike it, all that ejective spring off push that sphere back of it.
-We pushed it.
We pushed it.
We save the Earth once again.
So, we'll send the space probebam Hit this thing and push it out of the way.
Hooray.
It's gonna miss us.
Not so quick.
There is another problem.
There is chance the asteroid could going to region of space, called the key hole.
And if the asteroid passes through that region, here's gravity has just to right strength, to bend the orbit of asteroid enough that in some point later it comes back and the Earth and the asteroid at the same place at the same time.
Boom.
We have an impact.
So, instead solving the problem we just postponed.
So, if it passes through this region of space, bam, we are hit.
-Yeah.
So, what we do? -There is a technic we have called, a gravity tractor.
A gravity tractor is nothing more than a small spacecraft.
Maybe the size of communication satellite.
A tone or two will do.
We park the spacecraft next to the asteroid never actually touch the asteroid.
We use the ion frosters on the spacecraft to prevent the two from falling together do they the wrong natural gravity.
If you not leading at fall to it, that must mean, that you toeing the asteroid along with it.
-We using gravity as a tool.
There only having a change the speed of the asteroid by literary fraksens of millimeter per cycle.
It's a finesse type of operation.
And because of the kinetic impactor created only a small pieces of shrapnel the asteroid's gravity will keep it all together.
We got him.
We save the world.
-Excellent.
So, if we see an asteroid or comet headed to the Earth, a two pronged approaches the way to go.
The first thing we do, smack it with the kinetic impactor.
Push it out of the way, make sure it's not a immediate threat and then we used the gravity tug and we finessed that orbit.
We put it in the precise trajectory, so, that we know, we are safe for the foreseeable future.
But our biggest enemy isn't just the asteroid, it's time.
The clock is ticking.
Apophis could be a real threat to the Earth.
We got the technology to do this, but we have to build the equipment and we need a lot of lean time to be able to lunch this thing, get it to the asteroid and move it out of the way.
Because it literally, a snail's pace maybe the difference between life on Earth and no life at all.
We better do something, now.
Before one day we looked to the skies and find out it's already too late.
BY AUDIO NOTE: REÂO
So, massive asteroid is bearing down to the Earth.
We are talking about millions of lives.
People could die.
This is the real thing.
We are gonna try to save the Earth here.
We all seen asteroids destroy in Hollywood movies.
But would that actually work? We're gonna put it to the test.
I wanna model an asteroid impact.
I need a big explosion.
It helps to know what this thing is made of.
We need to find the an answer, now.
Because, this may mean the difference between life on Earth and no life at all.
The Universe is a dangerous place.
Threats can coming from any direction.
But pop culture is play fast and useful defense.
In quiet often, the things we think we know are all wrong and when you deal with the Universe, the ignorance can be deadly.
That's where I come in.
I'm Phil Plait.
I'm astronomer on the mission.
My job is the debunk all the junk science out there in pursuit of the truth.
In the next hour, we're gonna to show you the real science behind the mysteries of this planet.
Our solar system in the bad Universe we all live in.
It's just may save your life.
Phil Plait's BAD UNIVERSE It begins with the flash in the sky.
Blinded by the sun, observatories don't pick it up until the last moment.
It comes in fast.
As it bears down, there's barely time to sound it alert before the stadium size asteroids slams in the city at nearly 4 and half million people.
And when it's done, all the remains of Sydney, Australia, is a burning crater.
Now, I have some bad news for you.
This scenario is 100 percent, guarantee rock solid bet the house going to happen.
An asteroid is going to hit the Earth.
Maybe is city, maybe is your city.
The questions are when, how big, where and can we stop it.
This the kind of predictions are make the scientist lose their hair.
But, that what predictions are.
There a big what if.
So, I'm gonna take you some place where we could see what happens when asteroid hits the Earth.
Once we see what even in a moderate size asteroid can do, I have a feeling really wanna learn how to stop one.
And the best place to go, if you dealing with a lots of energy, is EMRTC, which is an energetic materials research and testing center.
EMRTC is one of the coolest places on the planet.
It's where engineers, scientists and the military comes to blows up, just to see what happens, all in the name of science, of course.
The place is littered with tanks, missiles and stuff, I probably don't even know about .
There I'll meet with my old friend Dan Durda.
He spends his life researching asteroids and try to figure out what they made of, how they formed and what we can do we see one had it on our way.
Hey, Phil.
-Hey, Dan.
Dan been studying these things for 20 years and if you need to know how an asteroid forms a crater, he's your man.
-You're ready for some impact physics? Yes, ser.
Dan is going to help me model, just how bad the destruction could be, if even the medium size the asteroid was hurtling torch Sydney, Australia and it was no way to stop it.
What we gonna see? -Well, the first thing we gonna see is a big loud explosion.
-Yeah, I would think so.
Behind me is a truck full of scariness.
This is 7500 pounds of ammonium nitrate fuel oil mix, basically fertilizer and diesel mix together.
This is a 50 pound bag of this stuff.
Is an equivalent of 20 pounds of TNT.
We have 150 bags, the explosive equivalent of 3000 pounds of TNT.
All of these is going get buried into a hole and when you detonated bum.
That explosive charge is going to be a stand in for it to simulate the effects of impact crater.
If you just put the explosive on top of the ground, a lot of explosion is wasted, just going up in the air.
So, buried eight feet down, that's gonna maximize our crater extend.
We gonna have pretty awesome asteroid impact.
I think, we gonna get nice size ball shaped crater out of there.
Maybe 55, 60 feet across 15 -20 feet deep.
I cannot wait to see this.
Now, where we mimic in the impact of an asteroid using explosive, but asteroids aren't explosive.
Their destructive power comes from two things: their mass and more importantly their speed.
Together physicists call this kinetic energy and just how fast is an asteroid move? Well, let's compare it with something we can all relate to.
The speed of a bullet.
-Holy macaroni.
Look at this.
Oh, that was so cool.
-Little over a 1 km on a second.
When you fire a bullet from a rifle, it's traveling about 2000 miles on hour, about half of mile per second.
Typical asteroid impact velocity is 15 miles per second, that's thirty times faster than a rifle bullet.
Now, think about the kind of energy that is released when something moving that fast, it's something solid.
That velocity, that speed translate in the energy.
It takes a huge amount of energy to get an asteroid moving that quickly and releases the energy when it stopped and that's where the power, the real destructive power of an asteroid lies.
When the explosion goes on, the pressure way is going to expand like a sphere except the grounds on its way.
So truly it's gonna be a hemisphere, half of a sphere and as it expands its gonna get weaker.
Now in physics the relationship between the strength of that wave and its distance from the explosion itself, is call the inverse square law.
And that basically predicts that if 1 mile we're expecting a pressure 4 pounds per square inch and then 2 miles we should get 1 pound per square inch.
Now, the inverse square law should be pretty accurate predictor, but we also wanna see what happens with our own eyes.
This is a pressure detector, it's called a Bikini gauge.
It's named after the Bikini's explosion of the hydrogen bomb test in 1950.
This big circle will pop when is near about 1 pound per square inch pressure on it.
As they get smaller takes more pressure to pops them.
Here would roughly 4 pounds per square inch.
That's enough to actually damage your ear drums.
And if these little guys are popped, that's give you basically internal organ damage.
Yeah, right here is about right.
The icons of Sydney, Australia, are the opera house and the Harbour bridge.
We designed are impact at 40:1 scale and this mark buildings will help show us the effect of even a moderate asteroid hit.
You like my stunt double? I have some bad news.
This is a suicide mission.
You're not gonna make it, but we appreciate your dedication to the cause of science and explosive things.
All good? We also get nine cameras rolling on this thing.
So, we're gonna catch up from every angle in distance and in super slow motion.
So, you're gonna press the button? Unless you want to? -I'd love to.
I'm gonna push the button.
Everybody is ready? Here we go.
Three, two, one.
Holy haleakala.
-Look, what I just did.
Twenty seconds later debris was still falling.
That was amazing.
The bunker shudder, you can feel it, pushing to the side.
It was like an earthquake.
It's fantastic.
-Classic classic impact cratering physics going on here.
-Well, let's go to do some field geology.
-Yeah, I think so.
Great.
See, what we got here.
-Yeah.
Holy haleakala.
Oh, man.
You can see raze that happened on the Moon.
It's where the ejected comes out in this clumps collapse.
Let's go little bit closer.
First stop, my stunt double.
He looks pretty intact.
I mean, there is not even a lot of debris damage.
I don't think, that this is saying that is safe to be 2 miles from explosion.
In fact, if you watch the footage frame by frame, you can see the shock wave blasted into the dummy.
Let's take a more scientific look at the shock wave.
On the slow move camera, you can actually see the pressure wave that is expands.
But, what will are Bikini gauges tell us about how survivable this shock wave really was.
Oh, look at that.
Yeah, this were been a really sucky place to stand.
Just inside the two mile limit, trees are being blown down by the blast.
There is basically no surviving anything like this.
Your organs would be destroyed.
You would be basically turn in the karige cheese in cased by your own skin.
First degree raining down here that the scale would be two or three yards across.
So, imagine the cars raining down like in a disaster movie explosion where cars are falling from the sky.
So, if the initial blast didn't kill you, which it would and the sound way passing you by didn't kill you, which it would and if the hit didn't kill you, which it would, I imagine, something the size of the apartment building falling from the sky.
This is a fifteen storey apartment building right here.
Yeah, this is a part of the bridge.
It didn't quite make it, did it? There is Sydney Opera house.
The fat lady has sunk.
And then this.
Holy haleakala.
Look at this.
There is anything that should let you know that we have to stop this thing from happening.
We are standing on the revers right now.
All right, let's go in.
One, two, three.
Even from up there you can't tell how deep it is.
This is crazy.
-Yeah.
I was guessing about, what I say, seventeen, eighteen feet seventeen, eighteen feet, what you said.
Guess what.
It's seventeen.
Phil, what you got for diameter up there? Sixty four feet.
It's basically what we predicted.
For all of that power and all of that devastation, this crater was caused by an object had a been an asteroid impact, that would be about this big.
Incredibly, an object the size of a beach ball could of made this crater.
In since our experiment was done to scale, that means that the real asteroid striking Sydney, would a been 40 times larger.
And the crater in real life would a been a half mile wide by the eight of the mile deep.
Pretty devastating to poor Sydney.
It's named is Apophis.
We know it's coming.
We even know the date it could hit.
But is there anything we can do to stop it? So far, we demonstrated the destructive potential of an asteroid impact.
Now let's look at the obvious question, are we in any imminent danger? Asteroids and comets are left over debris from formation of the solar system 4 and half billions years ago.
And all that stuff is still floating out there.
And you are slamming into that stuff, to the tune of hundred tons of material every night.
That's enough to fill a ten storey building every month.
But most of us don't notice this light show, because world is huge and as the whole thing is spread out over ten of millions square miles.
Now, the wide produce of surveillance cameras has given us a better view of this spectacular impacts.
Spectacular that is until one hits you.
In 1490, Chinese astronomers reported the rain of rocks falling from the sky, stoning 10.
000 people to death.
464 years later, came the first confirm report of a meteorite hitting a human.
When its great big size rock, punch through the roof of the home Van Hodges, amazingly she escaped with just the bruise to her leg.
But the ants are working against us.
Every few hundred years, we were hit by something really large, like football field size, definitely big enough to take out the city.
But the ones they give me night mares, the ones that truly scare me are the asteroid that can cause what scientists call, an extinction level event.
Forget just Sydney, we are talking an asteroid big enough to wipe us all out.
Thinking can't happen? Think again.
This hillside is a timeline of the Earth's history.
Let me show you something cool.
Come with me.
Ah, here we go.
This is the K-T boundary.
The K-T boundary is geological dividing line between Earth's Cretaceous and tertiary periods.
Now, if you look right here from here on down, dinosaurs and very few mammals.
And you look up from here going up and there no dinosaurs and mammals taking over, which means at whatever happens right as this point is what wipe out the dinosaurs.
Whatever happened at this thin line of rock, changed evolution in a blink of the eye and scientist now believe, that there's only one clear explanation.
65 million years ago, a six mile wide asteroid strike near what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, near Yucatan Peninsula.
It was so big, that is the bottom struck the Earth's crust, the top of the asteroid was still sticking out of the planet's atmosphere.
If you detonated every single nuclear weapon on Earth simultaneously, the dinosaur killer impact would be a million times more powerful.
The world burned and the dinosaurs along with most species on Earth, where wiped out.
In the Katy boundary we found more than enough evidence to support the asteroid theory.
For one thing it contains a relatively large amounts of iridium, an element that's rare in the Earth, but very common on asteroids.
You also find micro tektites, little tiny glass bits and that was happened when asteroid hits the Earth, compresses the sand, turns into glass and stop blast out and lens all over the Earth.
You find a lot of shocked quartz.
Quartz, that is been ram far harder than anything Earth can do, volcano it's not enough to do it.
This is our point to an asteroid origin for this layer right here.
And the Katy boundary isn't just in Yucatan Peninsula where the asteroid hit.
Geologists found the same boundary in many locations on North America, in the major ocean basins and even as far as New Zealand.
The impact was literally a worldwide event.
And the astronomer makes the hair on the back my next stand up and that's because given enough time and if we don't do anything about it, this will happen again.
The cosmic clock is ticking and it's not a matter of if but when.
We hold the fate of our species, our planet in our hands.
And if you not believe me, why don't you ask this guy.
Oh, yeah.
You can't, he's dead and if we don't do something about this threat it will be our bones standing behind me.
And when we'll come back, we will find out, if anything can be done to save the Earth from Armageddon.
Oh, I love destruction.
Let's say, tomorrow morning, the astronomer spied an asteroid the size of the building, headed right for us.
We are ready to snap in the action.
And do what exactly? That's the problem.
We don't have a plan.
We don't have a technology in place, to face this threat.
But there is something we have a lot of, nuclear weapons.
Now, all that most people know about stopping the asteroid is the way they'd seen in the movies.
You know, the brave astronauts plant a nuke on the asteroid a blow into rubble.
But would that actually work? Can you destroy an asteroid with nuclear weapon? Well, let's find out.
I'm headed back to EMRTC testing range with Dan Drta.
Dan is the leading expert in what's call asteroid mitigation, the science a preventing asteroid disasters.
Asteroids fall into four basic categories.
Porous, rocky, iron and a rubble pile, which is basically a collection of rocks.
And today, Dan and I will test, what would happen to each one, if it were hit by a nuke.
This is our gun.
We're gonna be shooting it like an asteroids worth.
It's say 40 mm cannon And it look like something like tank.
It's just about.
Just about right.
This is our porous asteroids.
This is our stand in.
This is piece of sandstone and the next thing to do is to whack this with the projectile and see what will happen.
This is our simulated nuclear weapon.
It's tiny.
-Now this is just a test and there's nothing really nuclear about this bullet.
We are just using the bullet as a standing for multimega ton nuke and a rock as a stand in for a porous asteroid.
Thank you.
In the movies, the nuke obliterates the asteroid.
Let's see what happens in real life.
Ok.
Here we go.
Three, two, one.
So, what just happened here? Your nuclear weapon did a lot of damage to this asteroid.
Holy cow.
-See? -A few big pieces, right? One big piece, two cracked and bunch of shrapnel.
Now, imagine this rock, only 2000 times larger, we hit it with the nuke and snap it on half.
Now, instead one big asteroid coming at us, we have to asteroids along with 1000 of fragments raining down to the global disaster.
If this was a real mitigation attempt on a real asteroid, this a would call un mitigation disaster.
-Yeah.
I would say, this is sort of epic fail at this point.
Right.
This is not what you want to do.
So, next I think we're gonna have to do a more solid one.
Let's go to another asteroid.
This is a rock.
Is a piece of basalt.
-There are a lot of asteroids visiting pass us all the time.
What percentage of them are like this? About half of them.
Good dense rock like this.
So, there is a fifty-fifty chance that we have to stops something it's gonna be this one.
-Yeah.
Well, let's wrack it then.
Two, one.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, I loved destruction.
Come on, you got it keep up.
This is an asteroid physic time of the essence.
-We try to save the planet here.
Oh, I thought it gonna split right a part.
-No, no.
Consider it, it's much more substantial rock and it didn't do as much damage.
-For the most part the asteroid is still intact.
-These are 200 yards across.
Exactly.
Still very bad.
-That's very bad.
So, the rocky asteroid not much damage but still deadly debris.
-I'm taken a couple of pieces as souvenirs.
So, what's next? The nickel iron asteroid.
Its mass is so dense that even a small meteorite can do a tremendous damage.
It's hard to imagine, but this is a ton of steel.
About 7 percent of asteroids are like this.
About one in fifteen.
-Ready? Let's try this one.
-Yeah.
Yeah.
Three, two, one.
See what we got here.
Look at that.
It's really absorb the impact very well.
The good news from the nickel iron test no shrapnel.
The bad news, no damage either.
Which means, if we come up against one of this, we may have a hard time hitting it with anything that it will make it difference.
We've one last asteroid to try and that is the rubble pile.
A rubble pile is an asteroid that's been hit so many times by other asteroids, that's now it's just a collection of broken debris held together by its own gravity.
See, they orbiting each other.
What we got here is a bag of rocks, but in fact this is our model for a rubble pile asteroid.
Little left.
That's it.
Right there.
Good.
So, in our case this burlap sack is the gravity holding the rocks together.
When the projectile hits right here, think what's going to happen is instead of seen this things scatter, we just gonna see a mark here and the rest will get absorbed.
I think, you will be about right.
Here we go.
Three, two, one.
Yeah, well, there it go.
We are actually demonstrate precisely what we predicted.
The impact a bludarited the rock at hit, but all rest of the rubble pile really didn't even see that impact.
-Right.
Most likely, a rubble pile would just absorb a nuclear detonation.
It would be kind like a shooting a bb-gun into a pile of sand.
So, it looks like using nukes is risky and unpredictable and we'd only wanna use them as the last resort option against an asteroid that's right on top of us.
But unlike the movies there is a good chance that ain't gonna work.
-We got a remember, it' s Hollywood.
It is a movie, that's right.
One thing we have learned, if we want to use a nuke against an asteroid, we have to know in advance what that asteroids made of.
Now, is that possible? Well, sure.
We can learn a lot about what's up there by studying what we already have down here.
And that's way I'm headed to Meteoritics laboratory at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, to see what we can learn from meteorites.
Hey, Adrian.
-Welcome, Phil.
For eight years, professor Adrian Brearley, was the creator of one of the most comprehensive meteorite collections in the world.
Look at shrine to ex-terrestrial materials.
All of these meteorites are proof of how often we get hit by these things.
So we better start learning, how to stop them, now.
What I got here, is a cut slice of the very famous Allende meteorite, which fell in 1969 in Mexico.
If you are about to hit something with the hammer or even more importantly, laba bam edet, it helps to know what this thing is made of.
First, we gently cut off a small slice of the meteorite and stick it on the electron microscope.
What we found is grains, that all interlocked together.
We have an improve knowledge how strong it is.
Now, here is the coolest part of all this.
Astronomers can take what they learned in this lab and use it to find out about the composition of an asteroid, that's still floating in space.
How can they do that? Well, every type of asteroid like rock or iron, reflex the sun's radiation a little bit differently.
So, if we shine a light on meteor right in our lab and reflex that radiation back the same way as an asteroid we're looking at it in space.
-We can see, that we have a lot of silicon, a lot of iron.
That can tell us, that the meteorite we have down here, is made from the same material as the asteroid that floating around up there.
-In that's the case, we can tie a given meteorite to a given asteroid.
And that will help us if we'll see that asteroid heading for us.
If we then related to an asteroid that's coming at us say odd, this one matches what we notice about this asteroid.
It's a fine grain structure, its can hold together very well.
That means, we should do this instead of that.
That could be months of time we save and that can make a difference between this thing hitting or not.
So, that's great if we have a meteorite from a specific asteroid.
But, if it's a different asteroid, something we don't know much about, or worse a comet, then we are in trouble.
Comets.
If you thought asteroids were bad waiting to you get a load of might what happen if one of this comes our way.
By now, we know that the asteroids can really pack a punch and if we need to stop one that's headed for us, we're going to have to know much about it is possible.
But what if the object approaching us turns out not to be an asteroid at all.
What if I told you, that there was something even more dangerous out there than an asteroids, something bigger, faster, something we don't know where to look for and that can change direction on a wink.
Well, that's something is a comet.
A comet is basically a collection of debris frozen together into a big ball of cosmic ice and that ice makes a comet's movements unpredictable and deadly.
I can mimic that with the ping pong ball.
All I have to do is poke a hole in it and another one, this way.
Fill it with liquid nitrogen, which is it 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Now you can see the jets coming out here and here and with the comet that would really happens.
When this thing gets near the sun, that ice turns back into a gas and force its way out.
And then when you watch the comet it's start rolling around in all these crazy directions depending on which way those jets pointing.
And we can have a comet pass very close to the Earth and miss us except to have a jet suddenly push it into us.
And that's make comets even more dangerous than asteroids.
Remember back in 1997, when the comet Hale-Bopp streak across our skies.
Well, that comet was discovered less than two years before it pass near us and moving at 70 000 miles per hour.
If this 25 mile wide comet has change direction and headed our way, well, we wouldn't be here talking about it right now.
So, now that I scared you comes the next question.
Is there anything we can do to stop a comet? Well, to find that out we're gonna need to make a comet.
I got everything to do that right here.
So, this is gonna be a pretty good approximation.
The water is the main ingredient of comets.
I'll put it on spreads of ammonia a very common ingredient in space.
Coinsr, which will be our organics.
There are various organic compounds.
Founding comets like amino acids, the building blocks of life.
Some dirt, because there's a lots of rocks in comets and it's that carbon in it.
So, here comes the charcoal.
Comets are cold and so I need to chill this with dry ice.
There it is a frozen carbon dioxide in comets.
So, this is not entirely unrealistic.
So, just shake it up a little bit and the dry ice cost from being a solid into a gas.
Now, let's us see what we made here and we got a comet.
So, now that we got our a little scale model comet, how we can use it to figure out how to stop one of this things.
Well, comets are made from ice, right? So, if you're thinking heat, you're on the right track.
Remember, comet change direction by venting gas.
So, could we use the heat from a laser to drill a hole in a comet, making it at shut out enough gas to change direction.
Well, I just happen to have something here, that might tell us if that will work.
This is laser glows Hercules laser beam.
This is the most powerful handheld laser in the world.
Check this out.
Watch this.
That's hot.
So, we have our comet and we have our heat source.
Now, let's see if this theory holds water or in this case gas.
If this works, the heat from our laser will cause our model comet to meet a small amount of carbon dioxide.
We're doing something.
We are seeing a little bit of out gases.
But could this little jets of gas create an push to change the direction of our comet.
All right.
Let's go.
Well, let's pretend our model comet is the real thing and see if we'll be able to save Sydney from comet Armageddon.
Oh, well, so long Sydney.
So, we're gonna have to find something else and I get to say, I don't think that I'm done yet.
You know, it is occurred to me that we might missing something pretty obvious.
The sun.
This grapefruit will be our comet and this is our solar mirror.
It's called a Fresnel lens.
It gathered a huge amount of light and can focus it on one spot.
In fact, it's so bright, that I have to wear protective glasses.
So, if this will floating out in space we can use it to concentrate the sun light on a comet or asteroid just like this.
Look at that.
You can see the smoke coming up and as I get to the juice of the grapefruit you can see its sputtering out there.
Well, if you can make hot enough that material can turn into gas and shut out it would push the comet in the other direction just like a rocket blast.
It's pretty cool.
That was a fun little demonstration.
In the theory behind it is sound, but we are a long way from having the technology to make either a solar mirror or or a space laser work.
And to develop those kind of technologies is going to take time and that means we need to locate any killer rocks or comets as soon as we can.
We need to have that time to focus our effort what might be our only chance at stopping a catastrophe.
Currently NASA is already tracking an amazing 7000 nearest objects with more added every day.
So, what exactly are they doing with all this data.
Somewhere, there must be some kind of high command center, that digest and analyzes all of these information.
Some kind of NORAD for asteroid tracking.
And it turns out there is such a place.
I'm in Cambridge Massachusetts, at the Harvard & Smithsonian minor planets center.
Whenever the astronomer sees a threat in the skies, they send that information here.
The team at this nerve center analysis, processes and catalogs the data and they are always ready for the next threat from space.
Tim? Phil.
Hi.
Timothy Spahr is the director of the Minor planets center.
Could all our lives rest with just him? So, is it just you? -No, there are six people here in Minor planets.
-Six? There are six people who are handling all of this information, all of this data about objects out of space they are passing the Earth? Yes.
That's not even really enough to stuff a food restaurant.
It's pretty amazing.
-We are good people.
That makes me feel better.
It's just a half dozen people who come to the office every day and they have the fate of the world in their hands.
There's plenty of rooms for things to sneak passed us.
In order to cover the entire sky every night we have to quadruple all the number of observatories.
There also the problem that half of the objects can come from the sun side of the sky and no server detect those objects.
So, you get no warning before impact and I mean no warning at all.
Basically, the first notice we have is a flash on the sky.
Yeah and then boom.
Maybe we get 24 hours warning on a 100 meter object.
So, if we sees something that big coming in what do you do? -I don't really think we do anything.
We'd evacuate.
Yeah.
What are you do on the Sunday April 13.
2046? Well, mark your calendar, because that's the day we maybe hit by this killer rock.
So, we know that's sooner or later killer asteroid or comet is going to have Earth and its crossroads.
And right now, we may be virtually defenseless.
To have any hope to developing the technology to stop Armageddon we need advance warning what's coming and when.
And that starts with telescopes.
Telescopes like this one.
I'm high in Magdalena mountains of New Mexico, at the Magdalena ridge observatory.
The observatory operates on the watchful eyes of Eileen and Bill Ryan.
This husband and wife team has spent the last 17 years hunting for comets and asteroids that could wipe us out.
Holy Haleakala.
Look at that.
There's the telescope, Phil.
All right.
Let's fire this things up.
-Set.
Holy That's awesome.
It's 52 000 pounds.
-So, more than 27 times.
I see stars.
Holy grace.
So, now basically we'll be able opponent at some object of interest.
No the enemy.
That's our motto.
-Let's go.
So, how do you find the tiny moving object in the sky? Well, you start by looking at things they aren't moving.
This is the stars are much more distant.
They appear to us as essentially stationary.
So, we will take a series of images and we will move through them we see that we have a very clear object moving through the field.
On average might ten or twelve discovered per night.
We have to assess are they a danger, how strong are they, how big are they.
All of that work that we do can leads to predictions for when and where an object will hit.
The good news is that if one of this objects big enough and far enough away.
We have pretty decent chances detecting it with plenty with advance warning.
The bad news is that we already seen something big and it's headed for us.
The fact, it's going right through our neighborhood.
-Forget the neighborhood.
This one gonna pass right through your front door.
This is a model of a real asteroid, called Apophis.
It could be -A rubble pile.
It's a size of football stadium.
-So, it's couple of yards across.
Practically like a city block.
-And you said it comes close.
How close is close? -Let me show you.
What we have here is jet propulsion laboratories, small body database.
You can go and look up the orbits of any nearest asteroid.
Watch closely here, the closing distance between Apophis and the Earth.
Here we are 2029.
Look at that.
That's pretty close, isn't it? This thing is gonna pass so close to the Earth in 2029, it's gonna fly under the high our communication satellites.
What's happen if it hits us? An object of that size if would strike the Earth would that energy about 500 megatons.
That's 10 times larger than the largest nuclear weapon ever detonate on the face of the Earth.
And 5000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
What would happen if something like that came in over Sydney harbor? They would be no Sydney after that.
So, the goal here is to stop it.
How we do that? Three, two, one.
Remember, our test show that using the nuclear weapon is risky.
It's a last resort option against the asteroid that's already so close, that's there no other choice.
But with an asteroid like Apophis, we have years a lead time.
So, is there a better approach? Probably the best solution that we have in hand right now today something that we can actually do, is something called a kinetic impactor.
Kinetic impactor is a spacecraft fired at the distant asteroid, that in theory will actually pushed the asteroid out of the way.
If we have enough advance warning, a little push maybe all it takes to change the asteroid's course from a devastating impact to near miss.
And Dan and I were headed to the southwest research institute in Texas, to put that theory to the test.
Sorry, I hear you have a pretty big gun around here.
That we do.
-Yeah.
This is our kinetic kill spacecraft.
We gonna shut this at 2 km/seconds.
-We have our impactor, now what we need is an asteroid and it's just happen that we have one.
Yeah, smells like mass extinction.
The weighs 2700 pounds.
We gonna set the sphere down, so that the impactor would hit it straight on.
That's it.
That's a center.
-We gonna smack it as hardest we can and get all that force right into it.
We only can do that once.
Now, back in 2005, NASA did something similar with their Deep impact mission, where they slam to giant block of copper into a comet.
And while it proof that we could hit a spitting comet with a kinetic space craft, the impact itself through up so much dust, that was difficult to study the results.
So, we don't know exactly what happened.
Today we are gonna find out exactly what's going to happen.
It isn't just a force of the spacecraft hitting the asteroid that matters.
The impact also releases debris or injective which acts like the frost from the rocket, pushing the asteroid even more in opposite direction.
Shooting granite chunks out of here at one or two km/second.
That's gonna be transform.
Even more momentum.
It's more bang for your bag.
-You got it.
Look likes we gonna make a death star here.
Let's blow this thing and go home.
-Awesome.
We will find out if we deflect it an asteroid Holy haleakala.
Look at that.
or just made a bad problem even worse.
We are about to test whether our remark space probe, call the kinetic impactor, has enough power to push it an asteroid out of the way.
Now it's time to lock, load and fire.
-This is 850 g of smoke propellant.
So, almost two pounds of propellant.
-Correct.
Can I hit the button? -I wish, I could say yes, but no.
No? All right.
Here we go.
-Yeah.
Awesome.
If the impactor can push the sphere even of a fraction of an inch, the test will be a success.
We will fire on zero.
-Five, four, three, two, one, zero.
Let's go see what we got here.
-OK.
Oh, my God.
Look at that.
Holy haleakala.
Look at that.
-Look at that.
Cracked all and back to here.
-That's a 120 degrees of crack.
I'm dying to see high speed footage.
Take a pick of this.
What we got here? One? -I'm just gonna play this frame by frame at the beginning that you can see what's going on.
Start here to see that.
-Oh, projectile.
Oh, that's a projectile.
-Is not that awesome? Look.
Kick it back.
-It's what we wanted.
That's our deflection.
-Yeah, right.
Not only that we strike it, all that ejective spring off push that sphere back of it.
-We pushed it.
We pushed it.
We save the Earth once again.
So, we'll send the space probebam Hit this thing and push it out of the way.
Hooray.
It's gonna miss us.
Not so quick.
There is another problem.
There is chance the asteroid could going to region of space, called the key hole.
And if the asteroid passes through that region, here's gravity has just to right strength, to bend the orbit of asteroid enough that in some point later it comes back and the Earth and the asteroid at the same place at the same time.
Boom.
We have an impact.
So, instead solving the problem we just postponed.
So, if it passes through this region of space, bam, we are hit.
-Yeah.
So, what we do? -There is a technic we have called, a gravity tractor.
A gravity tractor is nothing more than a small spacecraft.
Maybe the size of communication satellite.
A tone or two will do.
We park the spacecraft next to the asteroid never actually touch the asteroid.
We use the ion frosters on the spacecraft to prevent the two from falling together do they the wrong natural gravity.
If you not leading at fall to it, that must mean, that you toeing the asteroid along with it.
-We using gravity as a tool.
There only having a change the speed of the asteroid by literary fraksens of millimeter per cycle.
It's a finesse type of operation.
And because of the kinetic impactor created only a small pieces of shrapnel the asteroid's gravity will keep it all together.
We got him.
We save the world.
-Excellent.
So, if we see an asteroid or comet headed to the Earth, a two pronged approaches the way to go.
The first thing we do, smack it with the kinetic impactor.
Push it out of the way, make sure it's not a immediate threat and then we used the gravity tug and we finessed that orbit.
We put it in the precise trajectory, so, that we know, we are safe for the foreseeable future.
But our biggest enemy isn't just the asteroid, it's time.
The clock is ticking.
Apophis could be a real threat to the Earth.
We got the technology to do this, but we have to build the equipment and we need a lot of lean time to be able to lunch this thing, get it to the asteroid and move it out of the way.
Because it literally, a snail's pace maybe the difference between life on Earth and no life at all.
We better do something, now.
Before one day we looked to the skies and find out it's already too late.
BY AUDIO NOTE: REÂO