and the others arrive in the second Armadillo.Ī.J. Just as Harry, Truman, and the world believe the mission to be a failure, A.J. They make progress on drilling, but when they hit a hydrogen pocket, Max and the Armadillo are lost. After a vicious argument where Sharp calls Harry’s team the worst mistake in NASA history, the two men agree to defuse the bomb and work together. Even though it might cause the whole mission to fail, the President of the United States decides to remote detonate the bomb from Earth. When the drilling goes slower than predicted, Sharp reports to Mission Control that it is unlikely that Harry and his team will reach the depth necessary to split the asteroid before "Zero Barrier", the point after which the two halves of the asteroid would impact Earth. They embark in the shuttle’s Armadillo to find the Freedom crew, which landed 26 miles from its intended landing site on a plate of iron ferrite. On approach to their landing site on the asteroid, the hull of the Independence is irreparably damaged and the shuttle crashes, killing all on board except Lev, Bear, and A.J. and Russian Cosmonaut Lev Andropov are nearly killed but manage to get on board the Independence before the space station is destroyed. During fueling, a spark ignites fuel from a leaky fuel line, causing a fire. Before leaving, Chick apologizes to his ex-wife for wronging her and Grace accepts A.J.’s marriage proposal.īoth shuttles take off without incident and dock with the Russian Space Station Mir to take on the necessary fuel for the continued journey to the asteroid.
Over 12 days, they train with skeptical professional astronaut Willie Sharp, who will pilot Freedom, one of the two shuttles to fly to the asteroid, the other being the Independence. Frost, who has been dating Harry's daughter Grace over Harry’s objections, and geologists Rockhound and Oscar. He picks his best employees for the job: Chick, his best friend and right-hand man, drillers Bear, Fred Noonan, Max, and A.J. Harry agrees to help NASA, but on the condition that he bring in his own team to do the drilling. They recruit Harry Stamper, a third-generation oil driller and owner of his own oil drilling company. NASA executive Dan Truman leads a team which devises a plan to have the world's best deep core oil driller train a group of astronauts to drill a hole into the asteroid into which they will insert and detonate a nuclear bomb to split the asteroid in half. Knowing exactly how much will help us plan any future asteroid-deflection missions - not surprisingly, there isn't a lot of existing science on ramming your spacecraft into space rocks.After a massive meteor shower destroys the Space Shuttle Atlantis, NASA scientists discover they have eighteen days before an asteroid the size of Texas impacts Earth, destroying all planetary life. This will change the speed of the moonlet by a mere fraction of a percent, but enough that its orbit period will be affected measurably.
It's one large-ish asteroid, approximately 780 meters across - that's Didymos proper - and a 160-meter "moonlet" in its orbit.Īs the moonlet is more typical of the type likely to threaten Earth - there being more asteroids that are that size and not easily observed - we will be testing the possibility of intercepting one by smashing into it at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. The DART mission, managed by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (!), involves sending a pair of satellites out to a relatively nearby pair of asteroids, known as the Didymos binary.
NASA has a launch date for that most Hollywood of missions, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which is basically a dry run of the movie "Armageddon." Unlike the film, this will not involve nukes, oil rigs or Aerosmith, but instead is a practical test of our ability to change the trajectory of an asteroid in a significant and predictable way.