Never Saw It Coming

On March 2, 2009 an asteroid the size of a football field flew past Earth close enough to scare the pants off anybody who was paying attention. If it had hit, the impact would have created a blast equivalent to the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Amateur astronomers worldwide were disappointed. Not because they wanted to witness the impact, although a few undoubtedly did, but because the asteroid had been discovered two days before its passage, yet word hadn’t gotten out in time for anyone to set up their telescopes and look at it. Worse, they learned after the fact; the news had been deliberately suppressed so it wouldn’t cause a panic, even after the few astronomers who knew about it had calculated its orbit and confirmed it would miss the Earth.

When Craig Hendrickson learned about that, he set up the Near Earth Asteroid Reporting Database, or NEARD. People laughed at the acronym, but that didn’t bother him. As long as the right people used it—and yes, most of those people were nerds—then he would be happy.

The idea was to give amateur astronomers like himself a place to post their observations of short-notice phenomena so others could confirm their sightings and share the joy of watching a normally invisible piece of the solar system drift by close enough to see. Craig rigged up an e-mail alert system so people didn’t have to check the site every few hours, and he added a Twitter feed so people already in the field could get tweets on their cell phones to notify them of new targets to observe that same night. He publicized it on the Cloudy Nights astronomy forum, and a few months later Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines ran short articles on it.

There were the inevitable naysayers who condemned his effort as an irresponsible act sure to ignite a global panic the first time someone posted an unchecked observation, but Craig countered them by putting a prominent notice on the front page of the NEARD web site: “The observations reported on this site are preliminary, and speculation on any object’s path is just that—speculation—until confirmed by several independent observers.” That was too many characters for a tweet, so he shortened it to simply “Spec Alert” in the Twitter announcement.

Near Earth asteroids are relatively rare. Craig didn’t expect the system to be used more than once or twice a year, if that. For the first year it was pretty much as he’d expected: two posts, one for an object that turned out to be a known comet and one for something nobody else, not even the person who reported it, could find again. So Craig was surprised when he discovered his own asteroid just a few months into the second year while searching for the last remnant of Comet Murray as it dropped toward the Sun.

It wasn’t as much a coincidence as it might have been. With the economy in the toilet for the third straight year—now officially a depression—Craig’s job had evaporated along with most of the country’s wealth. He was “between girlfriends” in pretty much the same way he’d been “between jobs” for the last eight months or so. He had plenty of time to spend outdoors with his telescope, and no worries about keeping anybody up at home or having to get up early himself for work. Even better: he had discovered that time spent under the stars was time not spent worrying about his future. The joy of simply looking at the cosmos overrode all other concerns. So he spent hours simply scanning the sky with his telescope, and he had become pretty good at recognizing what he saw.

It was a warm night in early May, one of the first shirtsleeve nights of the season. Craig was in his driveway, cursing the neighbor’s porch light as he always did when he set up his scope at home. He hadn’t intended this to be a major night out, since the Moon was coming up in an hour and a half, so he hadn’t bothered to go to any of his more dark-friendly sites. Just a quick look before the Moon rose and ruined the sky even worse than the city lights. He hadn’t even gotten out his big telescope. He was using his six-inch Dobsonian, the one he called the “yard cannon” because it was just about the size of a portable artillery piece and you aimed it pretty much the same way.

Taurus and Orion had already set. Craig was hunting around near M35, the open cluster at the right foot of Gemini, for the comet when he found a relatively bright star that wasn’t on his finder chart. At first he didn’t think much of it, since M35 was full of stars; then he began comparing this one to what was on the chart and realized that the unknown star was at least a magnitude brighter than the chart’s lower limit. It should have been listed.

He checked its position carefully against the surrounding stars and drew it in on his chart. Then he went inside and posted it on the NEARD web site. His tweet simply said, “Found new object in M35. What is it?”

It takes three observations spaced out over time to calculate an orbit. The NEARD alert ensured plenty of observations, but there wasn’t much anybody could do for time, especially since the object was barely moving against the stellar background. That meant it would be several days before it moved enough to get even a rough idea of its path through the solar system.

That didn’t stop people from speculating. One possible explanation for its slow apparent motion was that it was coming straight at Earth, and since that was clearly the most exciting possibility, that’s the one people latched onto. The internet was soon abuzz with doomsday descriptions of how bad the damage would be when it hit. Apparently it gave people something besides the depression to worry about.

And Craig Hendrickson’s name was on the original post. Worse, his “Spec Alert” notice at the head of the Twitter announcement had been misunderstood as “Special Alert,” which added yet more artificial urgency to the whole business. He found himself inundated with emails and phone calls from journalists all over the world, all with the same question: How long do we have to live?

“Look,” he told them, “we don’t know where it’s headed. It could be moving away from us. But even if it’s not, the odds of it hitting Earth are almost zero.”

On the news feeds, that translated to: “Discoverer unsure where it will hit!” Craig’s phone began ringing practically nonstop after that, and his email inbox filled up faster than he could read it.

He spot-checked what he could. At least half of it was forwards of his original NEARD announcement, the disclaimer conveniently snipped off, with several added posts building toward the inevitable “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!”

Late on the third night after he’d made his discovery, Craig stared at his inbox, watching the “percent full” bar inch upward pixel by pixel. His cell phone added its low-battery warning to the incessant ring.

He navigated to the NEARD site, opened up a text window, and wrote, “YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF IDIOTS.” Then he deleted that, took a deep breath, and began writing a reassuring post, explaining how unlikely an asteroid strike really was and how the fact that there was any apparent motion at all meant that this one was definitely not aimed at the Earth. “Close, maybe,” he wrote, “but close only counts in horseshoes. There is absolutely no chance that this thing will hit us.”

He imagined all the nit-pickers out there who would pounce on that statement, so he amended it to read “…absolutely no chance that this thing will hit us on this pass. It will glide around the Sun, just like it’s probably been doing for millions of years, and it will head back into the outer solar system. By the time it crosses Earth’s orbit again we’ll have its trajectory figured down to the gnat’s whisker, and if it comes anywhere close to Earth on the way out, I’ll eat my telescope.”

He read it over twice. He thought he’d stated the facts pretty clearly. He hit “send” and turned off his computer. Then he turned off his cell phone, plugged it in to charge, and went to bed.

He woke to pounding on the front door. Bright moonlight washed in through his bedroom window. From the angle, it was about 4:30 in the morning. Craig staggered out of bed and pulled on his robe and trudged to the door.

When he opened it, a spotlight far brighter than the Moon glared straight into his eyes. His astronomer’s reflexes kicked in and he threw his left arm over his eyes to protect his night vision, simultaneously shouting, “Turn off the fucking light!”

It didn’t go off. Instead, a resonant female made-for-TV voice said, “We’re here at the home of Craig Hendrickson, discoverer of the asteroid that is poised to destroy the Earth in a scant six months’ time. Mr. Hendrickson, can you tell us how it feels to be the harbinger of doom for our entire planet?” She pronounced it “Harbin-grr,” like a dog might.

He lowered his arm and squinted into the spotlight. There was a TV van parked in front of his house. A shadowy bulk below the spotlight must have been the camera and its operator. To the right of it stood Andrea LeTour, the local news station’s morning newscaster. Her bleach-blonde hair looked salon-perfect, as did her makeup. Craig had always thought she looked pretty hot on TV, but in person she looked like a plastic mannequin.

“That’s ‘harbinger,’ ” he said. “It has a soft G.”

“What?”

“And who says the asteroid is going to come anywhere close to Earth in six months?”

“You did,” Andrea said. “On your nerd site. You said it will cross Earth’s orbit again on its way out, and everybody knows that Earth will be on the other side of the Sun by then, too, right in the asteroid’s path.”

Craig opened his mouth to refute her, but he couldn’t decide where to start. The asteroid wouldn’t have anything like the same period to its orbit that the Earth did. The odds of its orbital plane crossing the Earth’s at precisely the right point were vanishingly small. The odds of it being big enough to do any serious damage even if it did hit were smaller yet. And so on. But every time he’d tried to explain it before, the idiots of the world had twisted his words to suit their own ends.

He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing straight up in front. He widened his eyes and twitched them back and forth between Andrea and the camera, because he’d heard that you were never supposed to look directly into the camera. And he said, “All right, you’ve obviously figured it out. We’ve been hiding it because we didn’t want to start a panic, but you’re absolutely right. The Earth is doomed. Doomed! And it’s worse than we thought. The asteroid is as big as Mars! There’s no chance that life will survive at all unless we build a huge ark and launch it into space.”

Andrea’s eyes grew wide. “Are… are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” Craig said. “You said it yourself; the Earth is going to be on the other side of the Sun in six months. And when the asteroid gets there, smack!” He slapped his right fist into his cupped left palm. “What’s left of Earth will be a ring of debris orbiting the Moon.”

Andrea swallowed. She looked up into the night sky for a second, then pulled herself together and asked, “What do you plan to do between now and then?”

“What am I going to do? I’m an astronomer. I’m going to buy the biggest telescope money can buy. What are you going to do?”

She thought about it for maybe five seconds. “I’ve always wanted to go to France. That’s where my ancestors are from. Maybe I’ll go. Live it up a little before we all… all die.” She dabbed at a tear.

Craig gallantly helped her with the sleeve of his robe, which pulled open enough to expose his chest. She looked frankly at his pecs, and for just a second he saw a look in her eye that told him what else she might be interested in doing between now and impact, then she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes and looked away until she’d regained her composure. Craig felt like a heel for leading her on, but before he could say anything more she said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Hendrickson,” and she and her cameraman headed for their van.

Exasperation is not a good defense for causing a global panic, Craig learned. He quickly recanted when the Homeland Security goons showed up barely an hour later, and he went on news program after news program in the days to follow, debunking his own story and the dozens of other stories that floated around the internet, but as historians have learned since the first clay tablets were inscribed, once you get bad data into the system it’s impossible to get it out. And bad news spreads far faster than good, so the truth never stood a chance among the kind of people who like to forward email.

It didn’t help that the President went on TV to reassure everyone. After the economy had collapsed completely despite government assurances that prosperity was just around the corner, nobody trusted the government to get the time of day right. If the feds said the asteroid was going to miss, then of course it was headed straight for us.

Bad news sells, and times were indeed hard, so otherwise respectable magazines wound up running articles on the coming devastator, complete with diagrams showing the solar system—nowhere near to scale—with the path of the asteroid drawn as a bold line cutting right past the Sun and intersecting the Earth on the other side of its orbit in a big explosion. In tiny little print below the diagram they put the disclaimer: “Orbital path of asteroid is speculative.” In light gray halftone. And this after the orbit was finally calculated and discovered to come nowhere near Earth.

Craig only avoided prison because the prisons were full of people who decided to spend their last few months enjoying other people’s money and possessions. That slowed down considerably when people started fighting back and self-defense against robbery stopped being prosecuted as a crime. Another email that circulated around the internet claimed that the average intelligence of the world had risen about three I.Q. points by the time the wave of thief killings and grudge murders had died down. Craig didn’t believe that one, either, although it made him wonder.

Even though he knew the asteroid was going to miss, he bought a twenty-inch Starmaster telescope with the remains of his savings. Despite all the hoopla, it was his asteroid. He’d discovered it, and by God he was going to watch it cruise past with the biggest scope he could afford.

So were a lot of other amateur astronomers, it turned out. Telescope sales picked up dramatically worldwide, to the point where the manufacturers had to hire back their laid-off staff and then some to keep up with the demand.

A lot of companies found themselves in the same situation. Car manufacturers felt a sudden surge in demand for touring cars as people decided to take that last big road trip before the apocalypse. Boat builders found themselves selling out their entire stock within days. Computers and iPods and cell phones flew off the shelves as everyone upgraded to the latest, coolest gadgets while they still had a chance.

Even people who knew there was no doomsday coming still found themselves rethinking their priorities, and more often than not they decided to live it up a little, too. And not long after that, they began finding jobs again: providing the goods and services that a world full of sudden spenders demanded.

When Asteroid 2011 JD Hendrickson made its closest passage to Earth—a comfortable three-quarter million miles away—Craig held a star party at his favorite dark-sky site to celebrate. He invited all his astronomy friends from town, his co-workers at the mirror-coating lab he’d started with seed money from Celestron, and just for the heck of it, Andrea LeTour.

“You made fun of me,” she said when he reached her at the TV station.

“I was making fun of everybody,” he said. “But I apologize. Let me make it up to you. Have you ever looked through a telescope?”

She admitted that she hadn’t, and she asked if it would be okay to bring a camera crew to film the asteroid’s discoverer observing his discovery.

“Only if you can shoot under starlight,” he told her. “Astronomers don’t like bright lights. It blows our night vision and we can’t see anything for half an hour afterward.”

She laughed. “That’s why you were so upset when you came to the door. I’ve always wondered.”

“You didn’t think maybe it was because you woke me up at four in the morning?”

“You said ‘Turn off the fucking light,’ not ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ That was a first.”

“Ah. Okay. So are you coming?”

“Sure,” she said.

He gave her directions to his dark-sky site, feeling a little like a fisherman who reveals his favorite stretch of stream. If she talked it up on the news, he would never find any peace up there again. But she showed up alone just before dark, driving a hybrid Chevolt, and she wasn’t made up for the camera. Without makeup, she looked every bit as hot in person as she did with it on TV.

He introduced her around like an old friend, enjoying the looks his buddies gave her, and him. She helped him set up his scope, holding the truss tubes while he settled the secondary cage into place.

Craig’s observing site was on a high ridge about fifteen miles south of town. The Sun was already down in the west, but the sky still held a touch of red near the horizon. In the east it was growing dark enough for the first few stars to pop out.

“It’s pretty up here,” Andrea said.

“One of my favorite spots in the world,” Craig admitted.

“Is this where you were when you discovered the asteroid?”

He laughed softly. “Nope. I was in my driveway.”

She laughed with him. “The truth is never quite as prosaic as you’d like, is it?”

“People don’t want the truth, that’s for sure,” he said.

“No, I suppose they don’t.” She looked at the other astronomers, fast becoming silhouettes in the deepening twilight, then turned back to Craig. “It’s funny how it all worked out. We started a panic—” She held up her hands to forestall his protest. “You and I and about a million other people started a panic, but it wound up resurrecting the global economy. Who knew that would happen?”

“I sure didn’t.” Craig took a medium-power eyepiece out of the box and fitted it into the focuser, then swung the telescope down toward the southwestern horizon. A little hunting with the finder scope brought Saturn into view. He centered it up in the eyepiece and focused, getting the rings and four of its major moons as crisp as possible, then said, “Come have a look at this.”

She stepped around to his side of the telescope and looked into the eyepiece. “Oh my God!” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Now that response I knew would happen.” He let her look for a bit, then said, “See that black line in the ring? That’s the Cassini Division. It’s about as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. And see those little dots on either side? Those are its moons.”

“Are any of them as big as your asteroid?”

“Much bigger,” he said. “My asteroid’s about ten miles across. Those moons are maybe a thousand.”

“Ah. Not as big as Mars, then?”

“Hmm?”

“You told me your asteroid was as big as Mars.”

He felt the heat in his face, was glad it was too dark for her to see him blush. “I did, didn’t I? One more thing to live down. But it’s considerably closer at the moment. It looks bigger than Mars.”

“I’ve heard guys say that before.” She looked away from the eyepiece and gave him a mischievous grin.

He laughed. “I’m trying to imagine the circumstances under which that could actually have happened.”

“Okay, so I made that up.” She stepped away from the telescope. “So show me your great big asteroid, why don’t you?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

He swung the telescope high, looking for the familiar dot that had made him both famous and infamous at once. A meteor slashed overhead, and Andrea gasped. Several of the other astronomers oohed and aahed.

“Make a wish,” Craig said.

“I think I’ve already got mine, thanks,” said Andrea.

The tone of her voice left very little to the imagination. Craig looked over at her, then up at the deepening sky. This could turn out to be a far more interesting night than he’d bargained for.

That was one of the things he loved about astronomy. You never knew what you’d find out there in the dark.