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

  Residents found further consolation after learning that the situation could have been much worse. For one thing, the meteor that blew up virtually over their heads was not the only large so-called near-Earth object (NEO) in the sky that day. But this second object posed no danger to them. About sixteen hours after the initial explosion, an asteroid with a diameter estimated to be ninety-eight feet and weighing forty thousand tons passed Earth at a distance of 17,200 miles, which is well inside the Moon's orbit.15 It had been spotted a year earlier by astronomers at the Observatorio Astronómico de La Sagra in Granada, Spain, and was named 2012 DA14. They calculated that its next close approach to Earth would be on February 16, 2123, when it comes within nineteen thousand miles of the planet's core. At that distance, an impact is not expected.16 But gravitational attraction being what it is, every pass will bring it closer, so a day of reckoning will probably come unless it is stopped before then. When it passed by in 2013, 2012 DA14 posed no danger to Earth, but it was a reminder that very large rocks are flying all over the neighborhood all the time; as the late Eugene M. Shoemaker, a geologist and the first de facto planetary scientist, said, NEOs in the vicinity of Earth amount to a “hail of bullets.”17

  Those in the Chelyabinsk region who knew Siberia's history had yet another reason to be consoled: that is, it was not Tunguska all over again. At a little after seven o'clock on the morning of June 30, 1908, the largest impact “event” in recorded history happened near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, some 1,200 miles northeast of Chelyabinsk. The asteroid's size has long been debated, but it is estimated to have been roughly one hundred feet or less in diameter and to have exploded at an altitude of about five miles. The explosion seems to have been as powerful as a medium-size hydrogen bomb and at least several hundred times more powerful than the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The airburst flattened tens of millions of trees over an area of about eight hundred square miles. A few eyewitnesses reported that trees snapped forty miles from the impact site and that a precedent was set when the shock wave smashed windows. There were no reported injuries.18 Because of its magnitude, it attracted scientists for decades; more than one thousand scholarly papers were written about it, mostly in Russia. Calling such a destructive explosion an “event” is an understatement on the order of calling an attempted assassination an “incident.”

  “This is a much smaller event” than Tunguska, Tom Bissell, a journalist and a fiction writer, explained about the explosion over Chelyabinsk after he had done considerable homework. His 2003 essay, titled “A Comet's Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse” and which ran in Harper's magazine, was an exhaustive journalistic report on end-of-the-world possibilities that could be caused by too-near-Earth asteroids. He asks, “Can you imagine that happening above a major metropolitan area? It would either fill the churches or empty the churches.” Bissell went with Steven J. Ostro, a radar astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena who specialized in the asteroid-impact situation, to NASA's Deep Space Network antenna complex at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, located in the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, to see for himself where the radar imagery of asteroids and comets comes from. He also interviewed other astronomers at JPL and elsewhere and soon came to understand what they knew about near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and what they didn't know. He learned about countless tiny asteroids that pelt the atmosphere harmlessly all the time, larger ones in the one-hundred-meter-diameter range whose impact could seriously affect the planet's climate, and the kilometer-or-larger monsters that could bring on doomsday.

  “The one-kilometer threshold is important, for asteroids above it are known as ‘civilization-enders.’ They would do so first by the kinetic energy of their impact, striking with a velocity hitherto unknown in human history”—but well known in dinosaur history. “The typical civilization-ender would be traveling roughly 20 kilometers a second, or 45,000 miles per hour—for visualization's sake, this is more than fifty times faster than your average bullet—producing an impact fireball several times wide that, very briefly, would be as hot as the surface of the sun.” If the asteroid hit land, Bissell continued, the smoke from forest fires and other flying debris would shroud Earth in a long night, in a cosmic winter, that would last from three months to six years.19

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, the effervescent astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, offered his own take on the “event” to Clyde Haberman, a veteran reporter for the New York Times. “Think of it as a shot across our bow,” he said. The shot was a warning about all the potentially dangerous impactors out there, including one called 99942 Apophis. “It's from the Egyptian god of death and destruction,” Tyson said. “It was named knowing that it crosses Earth's orbit.” Otherwise, “we would have named it something less threatening, like Tiffany or Bambi.” Apophis is scheduled to fly uncomfortably close to Earth in 2029, again in 2036, and yet again in 2068, luckily without connecting. But Tyson does not think that luck will be on Earth's side indefinitely. “What is a certainty is that one day Apophis and Earth will collide. So our goal should be, if the survival of our civilization is a concern and a priority, to find a way to deflect it. We know how to do it,” he explained, but “there's no funded plan to do so anywhere in the world.”20

  The International Astronomical Union named an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter after Tyson in 2001. “It's officially called 13123 Tyson, but one can't get too bigheaded about this, given that 13,122 asteroids before mine got named after some other person, place, or thing,” he has written in a memoir. “I have nonetheless enjoyed the distinction, and I'm glad, last I checked, it's not headed for Earth.”21

  Indeed, since 13123 Tyson orbits the Sun with countless thousands of other asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, or Main Belt, as it is also called, and is therefore not a dreaded Earth-crosser, so it will never wipe out the human for whom it was named.

  While Governor Yurevich was delivering the news about keeping the heat on in Chelyabinsk, Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister of Russia, confirmed that a meteor had indeed blown up over Siberia. He added that it proved that the “entire planet” is vulnerable to such dangerous occurrences and that a spaceguard system is needed to protect it from similar attacks. Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister, took it a step further by proposing the creation of an international program that would alert countries to “objects of an extraterrestrial origin” that are potential threats.22 The international space community readily agrees and is moving in that direction.

  And then there were the conspiracy theories, which are as endemic to Russia as vodka, caviar, and the kazatsky. A poll taken by Noviya Izvestia (a serious Moscow newspaper and the successor to Izvestia, the Moscow daily that, with Pravda, were the country's largest and most influential newspapers in the Communist era) showed that about half of its readers accepted the official report that the explosion was caused by a meteor. The other half came up with several explanations, some of them truly bizarre. Some respondents said that they believed the explosion was caused by a secret US weapon test and, by implication, that their government was withholding that fact to save face. Others thought it was an off-course ballistic missile and was therefore top secret. Still others told the newspaper that the violent occurrence high in the sky was a message from God, while some of their countrymen and countrywomen claimed to be convinced that it was a crashing alien spaceship. And there were those who believed Earth had been attacked—zapped—by friendly, protective aliens in the kind of UFO whose platter-shaped predecessors piqued Americans’ collective imagination after some were allegedly seen in the 1950s. (The benevolent visitors from Mars and elsewhere helped fill movie theaters that showed The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, It Came from Outer Space, and other cinematic potboilers.) A fraction of those who were polled confided their suspicion that the object that blew up was an extraterrestrial Trojan horse carrying a space virus that was meant to w
ipe out Earth.23

  If Martians or other aliens did indeed want to contaminate the people of Chelyabinsk and then all other Earthlings by blowing up a meteor that carried a deadly virus, they failed miserably. The city and surrounding areas were not stricken by a plague or by any epidemic. The Trojan-horse crowd was in venerable company, though. Isaac Newton, who fled London for the countryside to avoid the plague of 1665, believed that comets that year and the year before had delivered the deadly creatures to Earth. And in their 1979 book, Diseases from Space, British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and Sri Lankan scientist Nalin C. Wickramasinghe unequivocally resurrected the theory of diseases brought to the cradle of humanity by comets, and they did so right up front: “We shall be presenting arguments and facts which support the idea that the viruses and bacteria responsible for the infectious diseases of plants and animals arrive at the Earth from space. Furthermore, we shall argue that apart from their harmful effect, these same viruses and bacteria have been responsible in the past for the origin and evolution of life on the Earth. In our view, all aspects of the basic biochemistry of life come from outside the Earth.”24 It is an appealing theory since spontaneous generation—that life just suddenly appeared naturally—defies logic. That leaves two other possibilities: God created life on Earth, or life came from somewhere else.

  A number of astronomers, astrophysicists, and other scientists have taken issue with the cometary-disease theory because they believe it is a gross oversimplification and does not identify a source. “There are a host of objections to life and diseases from comets including no obvious connection between the arrival of large comets in the Earth's neighborhood and worldwide epidemics,” Donald K. Yeomans, a JPL astrophysicist, wrote in his book Comets. “Influenza viruses, for example, are parasitic and require host cells from specific animals to thrive. Presumably, the necessary animals do not reside in comets,” he added with unconcealed scorn. He did theorize that comets may have provided Earth with the basic materials that are necessary for life to form, but he clearly believed that the notion they were arcs that transported life to this world defies reason.25

  Chelyabinsk's political leaders immediately responded to its brush with catastrophe by ordering a massive cleaning up of the debris, which, as a national news service quoted them claiming, included more than two hundred thousand square meters of broken glass. That estimate, made on the day of the explosion, reflected either extraordinary clairvoyance or, far more likely, unabashed expedience, since the politicians knew that the national government was going to provide the city and the surrounding region with as much money as was required to restore everything that was damaged and to care for the injured. If, in the end, Chelyabinsk was a bit better off than it had been before the meteor appeared, well that was all to the good of the community. That is why, after Governor Yurevich quickly put the damage estimate at more than a billion rubles, several other members of the local government hastened to add that the number would very likely rise. “‘Force majeure’ circumstances are always a gift to the authorities,” Gleb Pavlovsky, a cynical political consultant in Moscow, said of the event, which could be neither anticipated nor controlled, “because you can just write off everything that's stolen.”26 The meteor's explosion, in other words, gave Yurevich and his political cronies an excellent opportunity to enhance their community's net worth—and most likely their own—at the expense of the national government. It would be akin to the US government footing the bill to rebuild a town that suffered property damage because of a tornado or an earthquake and increasing the property value in the process. Twenty-four thousand military personnel and emergency responders were immediately deployed to the afflicted region to assist in the cleanup and to do whatever else was necessary to help the stricken city and towns in the region.27

  Chelyabinsk's leaders were well aware that the explosion (and the rain of cosmic debris that followed) was a rare occurrence and that it made their city an exceedingly distinctive place; it became a celebrity of sorts among all the communities on Earth. They quickly decided that the meteorite's falling where it did was not just a local event, nor even just a national one, but one that involved the whole world: it was a global event. The city had been randomly selected for an attack by nature as part of Earth's community—it had taken a hit for all of humanity—and it was strongly felt that a monument should be built to commemorate that fact. It is not far-fetched to assume that, consciously or otherwise, some locals recalled that Christ died for others’ sins and, in roughly the same vein, Chelyabinsk took a hit for the rest of the planet.

  It was quickly decided not only to commemorate the attack from space but also to profit from it. If the meteor was indeed a rarity—an exotic piece of the sky that had come to Earth—it was reasonable to assume that people with an interest in such things and who were able to pay for them would gladly do so. This was a chance for those who could afford it to actually touch the sky (without having to land on the Moon).

  Even as the cleanup was starting, then, a hunt began for pieces of the meteorite that would be marketable. Sasha Zarezina, an eight-year-old girl in the impoverished town of Deputatskoye, which was founded in the 1920s around a collective dairy farm that is long gone, immediately went wading into the snow with other school children in search of fragments, some of which were the size of pebbles, some the size of Ping-Pong balls, and some as big as a fist. First she decided that she would save for her future children the small pebble she found in the snow. But she quickly reconsidered. “I will sell it for 100 million euros,” she declared. Larisa V. Briyukova, a forty-three-year-old homemaker, discovered a fist-sized meteorite chunk under a hole in the roof tiles of her woodshed. Then a stranger, one of many who were suddenly driving through the neighborhoods offering stacks of rubles worth hundreds, then thousands, of dollars, showed up and offered her about sixty dollars for it. After some haggling, Ms. Briyukova got the price up to $230. A few hours later, while she was still congratulating herself on having gotten the higher price, another man pulled up, looked at the hole in the roof, and offered her $1,300. “Now I regret selling it,” she told one of the foreign journalists who rushed to the region for what was instantly understood to be a very big story. “But then, who knows?” she added after a moment's thought. “The police might have come and taken it away anyway.”28

  While service workers and volunteers worked to pick up smashed glass, repair windows and do light repairs on damaged buildings, many of their friends and neighbors quickly realized that the once-in-a-lifetime occurrence could make money for them; that selling actual pieces of the sky could be profitable. Curious individuals who took time off from work or school that Friday to search for fragments just to see what a chunk of meteorite looked like were quickly joined by friends and neighbors who did it just to turn a ruble. Before nightfall that day, a search for fragments began, and it accelerated over the weekend.

  Four days later, the Los Angeles Times's Moscow correspondent reported that the sudden scavenging was being called the “meteorite rush” and that “prices asked for purported pieces of the alien visitor range from $20 to $30,000.” His use of the word purported showed that he thought it possible, or even likely, that some of those selling what they claimed were parts of the meteorite were in fact hawking counterfeits: that is, Earth rocks that gullible souvenir collectors could be convinced had just come from out of this world. Appropriately, the newspaper ran the story under a headline that announced, “Rubles from Heaven: Russians Scoop up Meteorite Chunks for Sale.”29

  “For sale: a piece of meteorite,” proclaimed one ad taken in a newspaper by someone using the name “Yevgeny” who asked $10,000 for a space rock without specifying its size. “Cures cancer, AIDS and prostate. Improves academic performance at school.” Another individual claimed in an ad that his or her sample “improves male potency, reduces weight. Price by agreement. Exchange for a car or real estate a possibility.” A black porous stone that was about three inches in diameter was put on sale on eBay, and by
Tuesday, it had brought in eighty-four bids, the highest being $4,100.30

  Maxim, a university student from Yemanzhelinsk, a town twenty kilometers south of Chelyabinsk, collected several dozen pieces of what he thought was the meteorite while they were still hot. He said that they were black and hard and looked like porous coal. He kept the largest one, which weighed eighteen grams, gave a dozen smaller ones to a visiting scientist, and put seven pieces that weighed roughly six grams each on sale on the Internet. Maxim (who would not give his last name to protect his privacy) said that he got a dozen calls, including ones from potential buyers in Germany and one from a museum in the United States. He told the Los Angeles Times correspondent that he sold one fragment weighing three grams for the equivalent of $150 and wanted the equivalent of $200 for those weighing six grams. No wonder he said that he intended to go back to the “treasure field” to look for more sources of revenue. Conscious of the historical importance of the meteorite, Maxim's fellow townspeople even collected broken glass to give to friends and relatives as souvenirs.31

  Ms. Briyukova's fears about the police notwithstanding, law enforcement took a decidedly dim view of the craze. “Some people can be easily confused and compelled to buy something they later will be sorry for, as some other people are taking advantage of the situation,” Anzhelika Cherkova, a police spokeswoman, said. She told the Los Angeles Times correspondent that some “entrepreneurs” might have been trying to make easy money “selling something which has nothing to do with the real meteorite. But even if they are selling the real stuff,” she added, “no one knows whether it can pose a health hazard until examined by experts.” The fear of contracting something horrible from spaceborne bugs clearly ran through many Russians’ minds.32