Meteorites in The New Yorker
By Joshua Rothman Share
It's one thing to know, in an abstract way, that meteors and asteroids can hit the Earth. It's another for it actually to happen, as it did this morning, in Siberia, where a meteor exploded in midair, creating a glass-shattering shock wave that injured hundreds of people. What's really crazy is that the Siberian exploding meteor isn't even today's only celestial-body-related event. This afternoon, an asteroid named 2012 DA14 will be making what NASA has called a "record close approach," for an object of its size, to Earth. The asteroid, which is a hundred and sixty feet long and weighs a hundred and sixty thousand tons, will come within seventeen thousand two hundred miles of us - less than one-tenth of the distance between Earth and the moon, and closer than many of our geosynchronous weather and communications satellites. 2012 DA14 and the Siberian meteor approached our planet from different directions, which means that their simultaneous convergence is just a big coincidence. Whether that makes today more or less unnerving is up to you. Though the meteor explosion in Siberia injured a number of people, Earth as a whole got off easy. In a riveting 1997 Annals of Space article, "Is This the End?," Timothy Ferris reflected upon the brute celestial fact that we now associate with really big asteroids and meteors - that "scattered enclaves of humans might survive a major comet impact, but human civilization almost certainly would not." His article traces, step-by-step, the series of events that would lead to a "The Road"-style global apocalypse. (You should read it immediately, to be prepared.) His worst-case scenario is steeped in the chilly, asteroidal, Wagnerian sense of doom that Lars von Trier used to such great effect in "Melancholia." In the last days, the comet dominates the sky as it does a billion nightmares. Its nucleus is bright enough to stand out in broad daylight, and by night its foggy milk-white nucleus and bridal-veil tail make for one of the prettiest things humans have ever seen in the sky, and one of the last. On the final night, debris blown off the comet as it passed near the sun starts striking Earth. Fireballs light up the sky. A meteorite punches a hole in an apartment house in Morocco. Another sets fire to oak trees in Anatolia. The comet hits near Bermuda just before dawn Eastern time. The explosion vaporizes an enormous sphere of air, seawater, and soil, cutting a crater a hundred miles in diameter in the ocean floor. This makes a thunderclap that rolls through Philadelphia and New York a little over an hour later and will thereafter be heard, rather more faintly, in London, Moscow, Rio, and Tokyo.... [A tsunami] stacks up over the Grand Banks, then hits Manhattan at sunrise at a height of six hundred feet.... The conflagration begins within the hour, as a spectacular meteor shower best seen from Asia, where it is evening. Clumps of debris thrown into space by the exploding comet have been launched in all directions, like fleets of ICBMs, and now they descend, filling the night with fireballs. Soon the world is ablaze, and the air turns black with soot.... With the world's food surpluses amounting, typically, to less than a year's supply, people who manage to survive the initial blast, floods, and fires will find themselves confronting starvation. It seems absurd that we should have to passively wait for the end; surely human ingenuity can figure out a way to intercept an incoming asteroid. Ferris meets with Edward Teller, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and who advocates the development of a weapons platform capable of knocking Earth-bound asteroids and comets off course. Nuclear weapons, Teller argues, could be used to vaporize tiny rocks and knock the bigger ones off course. But some critics object to his proposal to use nukes for such a purpose, citing the risk of radioactive meteorites. Others, including Carl Sagan, offer a more surprising objection: "Even a non-nuclear deflection system," Sagan says, "if it fell into the hands of a maniac, could be used to redirect a previously benign comet or asteroid into a collision course with Earth." What's the greater threat, Sagan asks Ferris - an asteroid hitting the Earth or a madman taking control of the asteroid-defense system and steering one our way? It's a villainous scheme worthy of a James Bond movie. In his 2011 article, "Vermin of the Sky," Tad Friend attends a meeting of NASA's Ad Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense - "seven graying men with laptops and unstylish haircuts." The Task Force is co-chaired by Russell Schweickart, a former astronaut who took the first untethered space walk. Today, Schweickart explains, there are three options for deflecting near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Really big objects, a half kilometre or more across, would have to be destroyed with nukes. But smaller objects could be nudged off course with "kinetic impactors," which are basically bullet-spacecraft stuffed with lead and copper. And truly small NEOs could be "nudged aside" using a "gravity tractor" - "a plasma-powered craft," Friend writes, "that would hover near the NEO and use its own gravity to deflect the target." Ultimately, some of the biggest obstacles are political. "The difficulty that planetary defense has always faced," Friend explains, is that until an asteroid looms in its "death plunge" the topic seems remote from constituent concerns. No political glory or capital accrues from taking measures that might, decades later, prove to have been prudent. There's also the gravitas question, a.k.a. the "giggle factor." Representative Dana Rohrabacher,r, a conservative Republican from California's Orange Country, who has been the leading (if not the only) voice in Congress for planetary defense, told me, "Anybody who talks about objects from space is ridiculed as the Chicken Little congressman." Richard Preston, meanwhile, in his 1987 article "Dark Time," takes us back to a slightly more innocent period in the human-asteroid relationship. His piece is a leisurely and intimate portrait of the planetary scientist Eugene M. Shoemaker and his wife and collaborator, Carolyn, who have discovered thirty-two comets, which is more than anyone else in the history of astronomy. Shoemaker trained as a geologist and worked on the Apollo program; he almost went to the moon himself, which would have made him the first geologist to go there. (Unfortunately, he was disqualified for medical reasons; he had Addison's disease, the same endocrine disorder from which John F. Kennedy suffered.) The Shoemakers have a slightly more down-to-earth way of imagining the dangers posed by asteroids. An asteroid, Shoemaker points out, doesn't even have to hit the ground to unleash destruction. Perhaps once a century, he speculates, a meteor explodes in the atmosphere with the approximate force of an atomic bomb. "Suppose that a twelve-megaton airburst," created by such a meteor, "went off over a politically unstable region.... Suppose it happened over Pakistan, and suppose Pakistan had the bomb. The heat, the light, getting knocked on your fanny by the shock wave - a large number of people would swear they had been nuked. The people leadership might say, 'Oh, those S.O.B.s! They've nuked us!' And respond with a real nuclear attack on someone else." The vast majority of "impact events" are, thankfully, very small. In "On Impact," from 2007, Ian Frazier visited with the Nageswaran family, of Freehold, New Jersey. On January 2, 2007, Mrs. Nageswaran was standing at the backdoor when she heard "a large bang." She assumed that it was a leftover firecracker from the neighborhood's New Year's celebration. Later that night, her son Srini walked into the upstairs bathroom: When he opened the door, he saw shreds of insulation, fragments of Sheetrock, and pulverized plaster dust all over the counter and the floor. In the bathroom ceiling above the sink was a hole about four inches long. The hole was clean and vaguely deltoid in shape on the side closer to the roof, and more ragged on the bathroom side, with a few pieces of Sheetrock held by liner paper dangling down. Climbing onto the counter and examining the hole more closely, he saw that it also seemed to go through the roof, just a foot or so above. Under the bathmat, Srini and his wife found a shattered tile; "the broken tile lined up with the hole in the ceiling at an angle of about eighty degrees." In the bathroom wall near the broken tile, there's a dent, and behind the toilet, there's "an object about three and a half inches long.... a dull brownish-silver color and shaped sort of like a small croissant." The Nageswarans are plunged into a great mystery: Is this object a meteorite, or just a piece of space junk - the remains of a satellite or rocket, for example? (I won't ruin the article; you'll have to read it to find out.) In the meantime, Frazier reassures us that very few people have ever actually been hit by meteorites, and tells the story of the only person known to have been hit by one. On November 30, 1952, Mrs. Ann Hodges, thirty-four, was lying on the couch in the living room of her house in Sylacauga, Alabama. "The eight-pound stone came through the ceiling, damaged a wood console Philco radio, ricocheted across the room, and struck Mrs. Hodges on her left wrist and side." Mrs. Hodges's injuries were minor, but she was hospitalized anyway, to get her away from the crowds of people who gathered outside the house and wouldn't leave. She and her husband were renters, and, the law about meteorites, Frazier explains, is pretty clear: if it falls on your property, it's yours. Their landlady, Mrs. Birdie Guy, took possession of it. The Hodgeses sued, hoping to sell the rock to a "big-spender" meteorite collector, and they eventually settled out of court, buying the meteorite from their landlady for five hundred dollars. By that time, though, public interest had waned. They ended up donating it to the natural-history museum at the University of Alabama. Mrs. Hodges was disappointed by the outcome; possibly, Frazier speculates, "the unfairness of having to pay her landlady for the meteorite that hit her upset her view of life." The Hodgeses divorced, and Ann died young, at fifty-two. Still, Frazier reports, at the museum, the meteorite endures. In fact, "it is the main exhibit that visitors come from out of state to see." Illustration by Jaime Hernandez. Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day. E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share
Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker's archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes a blog about books and ideas.