The Near Earth Object planetarium short
##Resources
#NEOs Script
######1 Fly to Park Forest showing Chicago In 2003 The Chicago suburb of Park Forest was hit by a meteor. Itfragmented in the atmosphere and pieces landed all over the area. Each circle shows where a fragment was recovered. ######2 Park Forest Videos Overlay The fireball was recorded by security and police cameras. Let’s watch that again -- see how it lit up the sky. ######3 Park Forest Strewn Field Meteorites were recovered all over the area. The ones in cyan weighed more than a pound, the one in yellow more than ten pounds. ######4 Jones House infographic One of the largest pieces actually struck the home of the Jones family. It pierced the kitchen ceiling, and went straight through the floor into the basement where it bounced into a laundry basket. That meteorite is also on display here at the planetarium. ######5 Fly into Meteor Crater If we look closely we find evidence of past impacts all over. About 50,000 years ago a large space rock crashed into the Earth leaving behind this giant scar in the land nearly a mile across. ######6 Merge to panorama photo Today Meteor Crater, which lies about 40 miles east of Flagstaff Arizona, is a major tourist attraction. ######7 Show overlay on panorama The crater was produced by a meteorite 150 feet across. That meteorite was metallic, composed of iron and nickel.
######8 Gallery Timelapse We know what it was made of, because we’ve found pieces of it. One of them is on display here at the Adler, on loan from our friends at the Field Museum.
######9 Fly in to Manicougan Crater The impact at Metero Crater was relatively recent, The Earth has been hit many times in its 4 billion year history. This ring lake in Nova Scotia Canada is the result of an impact that occurred 200 million years ago.
######10 Chelyabinsk Fly in And new impacts happen every year. Most are over unpopulated areas, but not always. In 2013 an asteroid weighing about 14,000 tons entered the atmosphere and exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. ######11 Chelyabinsk Videos overlay The fireball and subsequent blast wave were well recorded on amateur video. The explosion released 25 times the energy as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Fortunately no one was killed, however 1,500 people did seek medical attention.
######12 Fly out to Chelyabinsk asteroid Orbit Pulling away from Earth we can trace out the orbit of the object that struck Chelyabinsk. We see that it goes out to the asteroid belt a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. ######13 Fly out to Asteroid Belt So far we’ve mapped out the orbits of about half a million asteroids, but there are many, many more waiting to be discovered. It looks crowded here, but it isn’t like Stars Wars folks. If you were sitting on one asteroid chances are you couldn’t even see another one. ######14 Highlight NEOs Some of these asteroids pass close to Earth. For obvious reasons we’d like to discover as many of them as possible. And once discovered we need to determine their orbits so that we can identify any potential threats.
######15 Apache Point Observatory For that reason Adler Astronomer, Dr. Mark Hammergren is leading a team of astronomers to observe Near Earth Objects using the 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. ######16 Orbit Bundle Our understanding of every asteroid’s orbit has some uncertainty. This asteroid, with the catchy name 2014 WR365, was discovered just before Thanksgiving last year. Its true orbit of this asteroid could have been any of the red lines. After we observed it at Apache Point we were able to significantly able to decrease the uncertainty in its orbit. Someday observations like this may be critical in determining whether or not an asteroid will strike us.
######17 Nukes in Space So what do we do if someday we detect an asteroid headed for a collision course with Earth. If we can get to it early enough all we need to do is nudge it into a different orbit – one that avoids the Earth entirely. There are different ideas on how to do this: we might attach giant solar sails, or fly an object nearby to give it a gravity assist. But most effective might be to strike it with a nuclear bomb and let the explosion push it out of its path of destruction.
But even if (in the most likely case) these observations aren't neccessary to save the Earth from destruction, they will still give us a better understanding of our solar system and how it formed. ###THE END