On Friday, I headed out to the MIT Haystack Observatory with a few EAPS folks to join the astrophysicists and astronomers excited to witness asteroid 2012 DA14, the approximately 50-m diameter object that reached 27,700 km from the Earth's surface before heading back out into the great unknown. For the scientists here, this was the equivalent of last week's blizzard -- a rare, awesome event of great scientific interest. Though, of course, it lacked in the more tangible wonder that accompanied the falling of snow and the gridlock it imposed upon modern society.
That is, until earlier in the morning, when a meteor exploded over the Russian skies, its shockwave shattering thousands of windows and injuring at least 1200 people. Amazingly, though, no one died, thereby helping to illuminate the true news story that accompanied it, courtesy of the Onion: "More Than 1,000 Russians Injured In Freaking Coolest Event Ever".
The result of the meteor was a heightened sense of confusion and wonder, one that only rarely manifests itself in the modern age. We feel that we have a good grip on most "natural" hazards, not in the sense that we can necessarily mitigate them, but rather in the sense that they do not come as a surprise. More broadly, they are easily explicated, and blame for consequent damages is easy to assign (rightly or wrongly) -- for example, no one who lives inland is surprised when a hurricane destroys a coastal property, because that was an obvious risk.
But the combination of meteor and approaching asteroid brought forth a new hazard, one that has long been sensationalized, yet has never emerged as a true concern, perhaps due to its statistical infrequency or perhaps due to the lack of sense of control that can be imposed on the problem (we couldn't see the Russian meteor before it arrived anyways).
And this sense was not too different from that of the blizzard here in Boston, in that life was so ground to a halt -- the only distance one could hope to travel was whatever distance your feet could take you -- that it felt as if one were in a bit of a surreal dream landscape, as if the world were jolted from the procession of regular, every day life, and reminded of the context in which our societies exist.
Thus, Haystack was an exciting experience. I know almost nothing about astronomy besides the Big Dipper, a relic of my childhood fears of aliens that appears to subconsciously persist today. Following a long and rather dense introduction to asteroids and Haystack in general (it was, after all, a bit of a sales pitch), we headed down to mission control, where the mammoth satellite dish radar was set to track the asteroid as soon as it crossed over our horizon from the North, at around 4:40pm. We then witnessed as the scientists looked at the signals from the returning radar beams, attempting to interpret in very short time what the data were saying and how closely it matched up to predictions of its speed and rotation rate. It was quite an intense atmosphere.
In the evening, we headed over to a set of observational computerized telescopes to look at the night sky and attempt to track the asteroid optically. After 1-2 hours of effort, the technician and one other planetary science student successfully located the object in the telescope's field of vision -- an admittedly impressive feat. We were officially one of only a handful of folks around the world watching with our very eyes as this space rock departed Earth's neighborhood. Once spotted, we simply watched the screen in wonder, tracking an apparent intergalactic amoeba -- a moving object shows up a small white streak on a largely red/black background -- as it makes its escape.
Very cool.
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