Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets whose orbits bring them into Earth's neighborhood. An orbit passing nearby does not by itself mean an object will hit Earth, but tracking these bodies is essential for identifying possible future encounters. The hosts use asteroid-disaster films to introduce the real task of detecting threats early enough to consider a deflection mission.
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5:41on its way to hitting the earth, we can more confidently now say that we have the ability to push them around and away from Earth." Mhm. >> This was by the lead author Rahil Makadia from the University of Illinois Urbana Champagne. And can I just say the news article where this quote comes from, they quote him as a planetary defense researcher. Okay. When I was in grad school on my CV is written graduate student researcher. This guy can write planetary defense researcher on his CV. >> How sick is that? >> That's so awesome, >> right? All right. So, as you said, let's get into the history and why this is so important. The threat comes from these
6:22things called near-earth objects. This is an animation showing all of the near-Earth objects that we've ever seen. The blue circle or the, you know, the blue orbit in the middle, that's the Earth. >> And look at all of these dots. >> Yes. >> All of these dots are threats to us. For those who are listening and not watching the pod currently, there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of these objects in near Earth orbit. It's it's actually a very nauseating amount. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's actually quite like concerning, right? Because if you look like let's just linger on this animation for a second. The the Earth's orbit, there's already a bunch that are sharing
7:03Earth's orbit. Yes. >> Right. Then you see there's a faint line where Mars's orbit is. That's the the red line. And then there's this giant belt almost cloud of orbits. That's the asteroid belt in between Mars and Jupiter right? >> Those are also threats. Not just the ones that are near, >> right, >> in Earth orbit, but like you can imagine like some random gravitational anomaly like Jupiter pushes one of these asteroids out of the way or these two asteroids get a little bit together and then they get nudged into the inner solar system. >> Exactly. It's like in a car accident. if you're changing lanes and you sideswipe the car next to you and then they're now sideswiping the car next to them. >> Yeah. And then there's a 18-wheeler behind like it's it can get bad really
7:44fast. >> Really fast. >> Right. >> Uh similar to the Kesler effect uh when a satellite >> That's right. >> uh crashes in orbit and then it basically creates catast catastrophic failure for everything because there's just these little things flying around and it's going to impact everything. >> Yeah. Exactly. And any momentum transfer can be really bad. Yes. Right. And Hollywood is obviously obsessed with this. We've got, as you were mentioning, Armageddon, Deep Impact. Um, I can't think of many more. Oh, Don't Look Up is a big one. That's the most recent one. That was more about like climate change. >> Yes. >> But it was still like the metaphor was really funny and at the end of the day, the literal movie is about a comet that is coming into Earth and nobody believes the scientists. So, this has actually
AstrophysicsOrbital MechanicsPlanetary DefensePrecision Measurement