Neither Martians nor asteroids

Neither Martians nor asteroids | Daily Tribune

Countless movies have been made about the end of days and how they could possibly come. In fact, Arnie, the muscleman, had one titled just that, End of Days, with demons at play to make for a truly apocalyptic popcorn flick. As Jerusalem burns so will the end of days come, according to what I remember from Baptist Sunday School for a purebred Catholic schoolboy. Yep, the devil, childhood pal Arnel, enticed me to just stand up and leave all the singing and praising God almighty to spend P200 from his uncle.

Faust I am not, yet I succumbed and off we rode a “patok” jeep to the next town, Taytay, Rizal. For starters, we ate clubhouse sandwiches and banana splits at Coney’s. Indeed, P200, especially for grade schoolers, was plenty of money in the 1980s. We also picked up a chess set, and that’s all my memory could muster of all the stuff we bought and stuffed into a potpourri made from “katsa” or a small flour sack.

Suffice it to say that inflation was yet to pinch us, Filipinos, with the peso-dollar exchange rate then at P8:$1, compared to today’s P56-plus:$1. The same P200 today will hardly buy two burgers, fries and drinks for two.

Back to that morbid subject of killing off planets: Remember Star War’s Death Star or that Silver Surfer? Add to that the more realistic scenario brought to the wide screen by Bruce Willis’s Armageddon and Deep Impact. Those two reckoned the end of mankind would come in the form of giant asteroids hitting Earth, decimating everything topside, just like the one that wrote “kaput” to the dinosaurs, killing all through an extended winter, if not from the fiery blast of a space rock spanning the size of a country engaging Gaea in a torrid kiss.

Thankfully, the days of fearing an asteroid Armageddon may be behind us. With US space agency NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, humanity now has a proven method to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. The Hera mission, set to launch soon, will delve deeper into the details of this groundbreaking achievement.

DART was a groundbreaking experiment conducted by NASA in 2022, in which a spacecraft was deliberately crashed into a small asteroid called Dimorphos, a moonlet orbiting a larger asteroid named Didymos. The goal was to test whether we could alter the asteroid’s trajectory, potentially saving Earth from a devastating impact.

To say that the results were astonishing is an understatement. DART successfully changed Dimorphos’ orbit, proving that we have the capability to deflect asteroids, a major victory for planetary defense. However, there are still many questions to be answered. For example, what was the exact nature of the impact? How much damage was done to the asteroid? And what can we learn from this experiment to improve our future defense strategies?

This is where the Hera mission comes in. Hera is a European Space Agency mission that will visit the Dimorphos asteroid to conduct a “crime scene investigation.” The spacecraft will study the crater left by DART’s impact, analyze the debris, and gather data on the asteroid’s composition and structure.

By understanding the details of DART’s success, we can refine our planetary defense techniques and be better prepared for any future threats. Hera will provide invaluable insights that could one day save humanity from a catastrophic asteroid collision.

Still, don’t go popping things though like that Champagne bottle, not yet. While cosmic threats may be mitigated, the greatest danger to humanity may come from within. The vast stockpile of thermonuclear weapons, combined with the proclivity of humans to engage in conflict, poses a far more immediate and existential threat. A nuclear holocaust could easily end civilization, leaving a barren, irradiated planet in its wake.

We, not Martians or asteroids from space, may be our own enemy.