Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) Read online

  Published 2014 by Prometheus Books

  The Asteroid Threat: Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-Earth Objects. Copyright © 2014 by William E. Burrows. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Burrows, William E., 1937– author.

  The asteroid threat : defending our planet from deadly near-Earth objects / by William E. Burrows.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61614-913-0 (paperback) • ISBN 978-1-61614-914-7 (ebook)

  1. Asteroids—Collisions with Earth. 2. Comets—Collisions with Earth. 3. Natural disasters. I. Title.

  QB651.B87 2014

  551.3’97—dc23

  2013051026

  Printed in the United States of America

  “Six hundred thousand people died, and the local damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been fought and lost in a single morning…. After the initial shock, mankind reacted with a determination and unity that no earlier age could have shown. Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand years but it might occur again tomorrow, and the next time, the consequences could be even worse…Very well; there would be no next time. So began Project SPACEGUARD.”

  —Arthur C. Clarke

  Rendezvous with Rama

  Preface

  1. Chelyabinsk: Russian Roulette

  2. Chicken Little Was Right

  3. Know Thine Enemy

  4. The Fascination Factor

  5. The Other Salvation Army

  6. The Department of Planetary Defense

  7. The Ultimate Strategic Defense Initiative

  8. The Survival Imperative

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Earth lives in an abidingly tough and dangerous neighborhood, but it is not doomed. Astronomers say that the next planet-buster—the one that could cause a life-threatening catastrophe—will not be back for a century. We will be ready for it.

  The word threat was chosen for the book's title because that is precisely what it is. And it is a threat that can be mitigated (as the growing planetary-defense fraternity calls it) because, for the first time in the home planet's history, Earthlings have the wherewithal to stave off the means of their extinction because they have access to space. That allows for an aggressive defense in which a potential impactor can be either nudged off course two decades or more before it collides with Earth or attacked with the same kind of weapons that were designed for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as Star Wars in the 1980s. Another way to assure our survival is to spread out and homestead other worlds, starting with the kind of lunar and Martian colonies prophesized by this book's honorary godfather, Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Like that great visionary, I am an inveterate optimist who is unalterably convinced that Armageddon can be prevented and that survival and growth are both imperative and achievable.

  WEB

  It is ironic that Chelyabinsk takes its name from an eighteenth-century fortress, Chelyaba, and that it lies in an area where top-secret nuclear-weapons research was once conducted and where there was a serious nuclear accident at a reprocessing plant northwest of the city in 1957. The radiation that blanketed the region killed or permanently sickened many people, though not in Chelyabinsk itself. The city's one-million-plus inhabitants thanked God that they were spared. And they had reason to thank him again on February 15, 2013, when the meteorite struck.

  Chelyabinsk is cradled in the low Urals, just to the south of Sverdlovsk and north of Kazakhstan, the latter having ancient ties to Russia's old nemesis, Turkey. Its remoteness made it the Kremlin's choice as one of the Soviet Union's main military production centers, and that included the “Mayak” atomic-weapons complex eighty kilometers north of the city, where nuclear weapons were long produced.

  Accidents, nuclear-waste disposal, and the day-to-day operation of the large reactor and the radiochemical plant combined to poison the region. Nuclear-waste dumping in the Techa River in the 1950s caused so many deaths and so much disease that twenty-two villages along the river had to be evacuated. On September 29, 1957, a liquid-nuclear-waste storage-tank explosion at Mayak released plutonium and strontium into the environment, amounting to twice as much radiation as was released in the infamous accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in 1986. The city's older inhabitants still vividly remember Mayak since it made their city of more than one million the most radioactively contaminated place in the world. The accident was, of course, ordered by Moscow to be kept secret.1

  Chelyabinsk is also a major producer of military equipment and weapons, which, combined with the Mayak facility, made it a priority target for U-2 spy flights. Many of the area's old-timers also remember the May Day three years after the accident at the reprocessing planet, when an American U-2 reconnaissance plane flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, two hundred kilometers due north. Powers and the exposed film from his aircraft were taken to Moscow and shown to the world by the wily Nikita Khrushchev to embarrass Eisenhower, the American president.

  In common with other Russian cities of any consequence, and with metropolises around the world, Chelyabinsk has a top-ranked professional hockey team whose name reflects the city's self-image: Tpaktop, or Traktor (“Tractor” in English). In fact, half of the city's twenty-two most notable personalities were hockey players in February 2013, while two more were nationally known musicians (one of them also a noted composer), and one, Maksim Surayev, was a cosmonaut who logged six months on the International Space Station as a flight engineer and did a spacewalk with fellow cosmonaut Oleg Kotov. Surayev's feat did not win him the prestigious Hero of the Russian Federation medal (which has replaced the venerable Hero of the Soviet Union medal), perhaps because his flight was not on Mir, the accident-plagued Russian space station that was intentionally sent out of orbit and plunged to a fiery end into the ocean in 2001. In any case, the snub by the defense ministry caused a furor in Roskosmos, the nation's rightfully proud space agency. The accolade, which is one of Russia's highest honors,
brings housing, pension and travel benefits, and a state funeral. The award has been granted to nearly every first-time cosmonaut since Yuri Gagarin, the first man in orbit, won it for his 1961 flight.2

  Chelyabinsk has other distinctions that make it one of the country's major metropolises. It produces bottled water and a variety of sparkling and regular wines, and it boasts a Holiday Inn with all the amenities that are found in the chain's other hotels around the world, including air conditioning, a restaurant, a sauna, minibars, a gym, and Internet access. The city is proud of a three-line subway system, which has long been under construction, and Arbat Street, a wide, tree-lined avenue with benches, clothing and jewelry shops, bookstores, a photo gallery and even an Irish pub. Strolling up and down Arbat Street and other thoroughfares is encouraged by the city fathers, who studiously ignore the fact that Chelyabinsk is blanketed with smog so thick that it rivals Beijing as a danger for asthmatics and others with respiratory problems. And as a sure sign that at least some of its citizens are determined to shake off all vestiges of the Communist era and embrace America, they have even opened The Wall Street Café. Mindful of their sophistication and their city's status as a major urban center, they count their blessings and regularly attend church, which, with the exhilarated embrace of capitalistic profiteering, is another sign of the repudiation of Communism.

  At the same time, a grim reality haunted Chelyabinsk. The harsh working environment, the accidents, the lethal radioactivity, and then the explosion at the waste-storage site all made the city socially as well as environmentally contaminated. Like other industrial cities the world over, its people's daily battle for survival in a tough and constantly challenging physical environment caused and perpetuated anger that often set neighbor against neighbor and kept the city in a state of low-level conflict with itself. Ballads and some fiction notwithstanding, there is nothing romantic about poverty, sometimes terrible working conditions, and pervasive illness that cannot be prevented or even treated for lack of adequate resources. And the citizens of Chelyabinsk were acutely aware of the degradation of their environment. It affected their dispositions, as it does in other places where people are impoverished, exhausted, and depressed by their surroundings. “The city is a place where people always seem bitter with each other,” said music teacher Ilya Shibanov.3

  There is one distinction, however, that Chelyabinsk emphatically does not savor. On February 15, 2013, the citizens of the city who believed in God suddenly had reason to think that he either was not watching over them or had launched a terrible weapon at them from heaven for a reason no one could fathom. At 9:20 that morning, people on Arbat Street and elsewhere heard a thunderous roar coming from the sky. When they looked up, they saw a large, bright, fiery object coming from the southeast and trailing a long, thick plume of smoke.

  There was a blinding white flash so bright that the stark shadows of buildings slid swiftly—and sickeningly—across the ground. The massive explosion instantly turned yellow. Then it darkened to orange. The asteroid—which had become a meteor when it plunged into the atmosphere and then meteorites when the wall of air broke it into large fragments—was about fifty-six feet in diameter, weighed more than seven thousand tons, and was made of rock that was probably laced with nickel and iron. Since its velocity was a scorching forty thousand miles an hour, it took only a few seconds to penetrate most of the thickening air. It was the terrific speed that made the sonic boom that got the attention of the people below.4

  The explosion sent out a blast of energy that was later estimated at 450 to 500 kilotons, which is almost thirty times the force of the atomic bombs that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into smoking, radioactive rubble. The shock wave that hit Chelyabinsk lasted for thirty-two seconds, which seemed interminable to those who suffered through it.5 It set off car alarms, and mobile-phone networks became overloaded almost instantly as frantic people tried to find out what had happened and connect with friends and loved ones. It also sent dishes and glasses flying off the shelves in thousands of apartments, and it slammed into the Railway Institute (a school) with such force that it blew in windows. The thunderous noise sent students running to the windows to see what had happened. Like some of their elders, many thought that war had broken out and that the explosion was made by an American ballistic missile. Several of the youngsters were hit by flying glass, some cut seriously. Going to windows to see what had happened was understandable, but they were the worst places to be. Terrified and, in many cases, bleeding, the students made their way down a staircase that was thickly blanketed with glass and onto the street. There, hundreds of people stood, looking in awe at the sky. Office buildings were evacuated and classes in the schools were cancelled. At least twenty children were injured when the windows of another school and kindergarten shattered two minutes after the meteor exploded.6

  It was the same in the Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Orenburg Oblasts; in the Republic of Bashkortostan; and in the northern reaches of Kazakhstan. In fact, to a degree that was imperceptible elsewhere because of Earth's ability to absorb punishing blows, the whole planet shuddered like a large animal that had been hit by a high-caliber bullet. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization reported that the sound wave registered on sensors from Greenland to Antarctica, making it the largest ever detected by its network.

  “I opened the window from surprise,” a woman named Darya Frenn later recalled in a blog. “There was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest. And in several seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in, along with its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on the desk.” Frenn's mind began to race with grim possibilities. She, too, thought that another world war had started and that consequently there would be nuclear radiation, which she knew was deadly. Her hands and feet went numb as she waited to hear about the fate of her family. Then it suddenly became absolutely quiet again. Within an hour, Darya Frenn learned from her neighbors about the smoking thing that had exploded in the sky. The force of the explosion was deeply frightening to those who saw and felt it because it showed them, in the most dramatic way, how vulnerable living creatures and their habitats are to the indomitable violence of nature. “God forbid that you should ever have to experience anything like this,” she said, still clearly shaken by what she had seen and heard.7 Alyona V. Borchininova, a barmaid, was shaken, too. “It was eerie,” she told an American journalist the next day. “So we stood there. And then somebody joked, ‘Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.’”8

  The flash from the explosion was brighter than the Sun, according to several people who saw it. “It was a light which never happens in life. It happens probably only at the end of the world,” wrote Valentina Nikolayeva, a school teacher who was horrified by a sudden vision of what she thought was the apocalypse, the absolute end of everything. “A shock wave. It was not clear what it was, but we were deafened at that moment. The window glass flew.” Since the outside temperature was five degrees Fahrenheit, she and everyone else with broken windows scrambled to cover them with anything they could find, including wooden boards and blankets. When emergency officials announced that a meteor had exploded, it occurred to Ms. Nikolayeva that it could happen again. “I am at home, whole and alive,” she wrote. “I have gathered together my documents and clothes. And a carrier for the cats, just in case…”9

  Denis Kuznetsov, a twenty-three-year-old historian who was in the outskirts of the city, said that he heard the explosion and felt the shock wave even where he was. First there was a blinding flash of light lasting several seconds that made him close his eyes. The light was “like ten suns,” he said, adding, “This is no exaggeration.” Then he said he experienced what felt like a “push” as a sound wave passed through his body. “For some seconds I simply stood” as he listened to the sound of breaking glass. After calming his parents, he tried to call his friends, but the cell phone was d
ead, so he went on the Internet and was able to reach a friend in the city center who told him that emergency responders were in the streets. At first there was widespread confusion, he said, with many people believing that a satellite had come down or that a plane had blown up. But within an hour, news broadcasts reported what had actually happened. “There was no panic,” Kuznetsov said. “All behaved quietly.”10

  And some of the city's one million residents quietly noticed that weird things had happened. Glass jugs were said to have exploded, dishes cracked, and electronic equipment died behind unshattered apartment windows. Balconies rattled. And one man said that a bottle broke as he was holding it. Anna V. Popova was at home with her daughter when she saw the flash and then heard the explosion. She said that the destruction seemed to be illogical. The windows of her enclosed balcony were blown in, but her neighbor's identical windows had withstood the blast. “A lot of people suffered, not us alone,” she said. “Who are we supposed to blame for all of this?” she asked rhetorically. “Nobody of course.”11

  Mikhail Yurevich, the governor of Chelyabinsk Oblast, immediately announced that keeping the city's central heating system operating was of paramount importance. He estimated that damage from the explosion came to more than one billion rubles ($33 million).12

  By February 18—three days later—1,491 people, including 311 children, had requested medical assistance, with 112 hospitalized, two of them in serious condition. A fifty-two-year-old woman had to be flown to Moscow for treatment of a broken spine.13 And by March 5, almost three weeks later, more than 7,200 damaged buildings were reported in Chelyabinsk and the surrounding area, including 6,040 apartment blocks, 293 medical facilities, 718 schools, 100 cultural organizations, and 43 sports facilities, one of them being the Traktor Sports Palace. Since the damage was extensive but, with few exceptions, not heavy, nearly all the structures were quickly repaired. The city promptly announced that all broken windows in apartment buildings would be replaced free of charge. That provided some consolation.14