Gordon L. Dillow - Fire in the sky: cosmic collisions, killer asteroids, and the race to defend the Earth

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FIRE IN THE SKY

Its only a matter of time before a really large space object hits the Earth. Asteroids and comets have created disaster many times in the Earths past, including the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, and the vestiges of their havoc are still apparent. Gordon Dillows enthralling discussion unlocks the secrets of how and why these objects jeopardize the planet and what thousands of people around the globe are doing to detect and defend against them. Fire in the Sky is nonfiction that reads like a great adventure novel, even as it points toward a hopeful future for humanity.

Roger D. Launius, former Chief Historian of NASA and author of The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration

With this book, Dillow brings to readers attention a serious threat to our planet. Its entirely possible that good science and R & D will be enough to avert catastrophe, but the mere fact that humanity could find a way to contend with whats hurtling toward us makes the threat no less real. What seems clear from Dillows tour of the front lines of asteroid defense is that we as a nation must find the willand the fundsto build the necessary tracking and stopping tools. Mother Earth is depending on us.

David Livingston, founder and host of The Space Show

Lucid and engaging... Dillow stresses that the threat is real, that the Earth is routinely hit by objects from outer space, and that it is certain that sometime in the futuremaybe in the coming decades, maybe millions of years from now unless mitigating actions are takenone of those objects will be large enough to cause catastrophic damage.... A convincing case for the need to pay more attention to planetary defense.

John M. Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, NASA advisor, and editor of The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration

Informative, timely, and entertaining... a great read! Dillows treatment is never dulloften humorousand provides accurate information about the resource potential of Near-Earth asteroids, their impact threats to Earth, and the ongoing activities to mitigate these threats.

Donald K. Yeomans, author of Near-Earth Objects: Finding Them Before They Find Us and former manager of the Jet Propulsion Laboratorys Near-Earth Object Program Office

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Copyright 2019 by Gordon Dillow

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First Scribner hardcover edition June 2019

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Interior design by Kyle Kabel

Jacket design by James Iacobelli

Jacket artwork: Comet by James Thew/Alamy Stock Photo;

Background by Deborah Bush/Shutterstock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-8774-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-8776-6 (ebook)

To my mother and father
Louise Blackwell Dillow and Troy O. Dillow

J ust before 4 a.m. on June 2, 2016, I was enjoying a pre-dawn cup of coffee on the back porch of my home in Arizona. And suddenly it was as if the sky was on fire.

It began with a glow that spread across the steep hillside behind my house, a kind of angry molten light, all red and orange and amber, the color of lava. The glow grew more and more intense, lighting up the mesquite trees and saguaro cactuses and casting their long, tortured shadows on the ground. It looked like something from the netherworld, like high noon in hell. Then, seconds later, way up in the sky off to the northeast, there was a blinding, thermonuclear-style flash, a burst of white light almost as bright as the sun, followed later by a sound like distant thunder that set my dogs to howling.

As the light faded and the night returned I stood there, transfixed, not quite believing it. As a soldier and journalist Ive traveled the world for decades, and experienced all manner of cataclysmic natural and unnatural eventswars and riots and all manner of mayhem, typhoons, tornadoes, major earthquakes, even (from a distance) the deadly volcanic explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980. But this was easily the most astonishing natural event I had ever seen. It occurred to me that this was how the world will end: with a flash of light, and a roar like Gods own artillery, and thendarkness.

Of course, the world didnt end on June 2, 2016. And in the age of 24-hour news and social media, an explanation for this amazing phenomenon was soon forthcoming. Apparently a small asteroid, a rocky piece of space debris only about six feet across, had wandered into the Earths path and exploded in the sky some fifteen miles above Arizonas White Mountains. The asteroids fiery passage through the atmosphere and subsequent brilliant explosion lighted up thousands of square miles of ground and startled observers as far away as Texas. Despite the early hour, the event had been captured on scores of dashcams and smart phones, so although no one was killed or even slightly injured, the Arizona fireball was a major story not only on local TV but on the national newscasts as well. And as I watched and read the news reports, a couple of things quickly caught my attention.

One of them was the almost unbelievable power of the explosion. Soon after the event, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) reported that the little asteroid had burst apart in the atmosphere with the energy equivalent of half a kiloton of exploding TNTthat is, a million pounds of TNT. To put that into perspective, the U.S. militarys most powerful non-nuclear bomb is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bombthe so-called Mother of All Bombswhich has a blast yield of a mere 22,000 pounds of TNT. That little asteroid made a MOAB look like a firecracker.

And there was another thing about that fireball in the Arizona sky that surprised me. That was the fact that no one had seen it coming. Sure, the streaking fireball and its subsequent explosion had been picked up by some U.S. spy satellites, by ground-based Doppler weather radars and by NASAs All-sky Fireball Network, a national network of cameras set up to record events like this one. But that only happened after the asteroid entered the atmosphere, not before. That space rock hurtling out of the clear black sky was a complete surprise to everybody.

As often happens, the more I learned, the more questions I had. Such as, how in the world could a piece of rock the size of a La-Z-Boy recliner pack an explosive wallop almost fifty times greater than the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. military arsenal? Why in this era of satellites and space-mounted telescopes and world-spanning radar networks did no one spot the thing before it arrived? How often do events like this happen? Whats the history behind our understanding of Earth-colliding asteroids and comets?