How to Kill an Asteroid

Starred review from September 1, 2024
It's impossible to prevent most natural disasters. The exceptions to this are asteroid and comet strikes--stopping cosmic impacts is possible and could save literally billions of lives. Framed around an account of NASA's recent DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test), Andrews takes readers on an exciting tour of how the science of planetary defense was born and where scientists are hoping to take it from here. He interviewed several of the most prominent people involved in planetary defense, sharing their firsthand accounts of their work and motivations, which provide compelling insight into this growing field. We know how to stop asteroids and comets from hitting Earth, using everything from deflecting them with fast rockets to disintegrating them with nuclear bombs. The challenge is mostly in how we detect these threats, especially smaller "city killers," and Andrews offers compelling arguments for the need to build a stronger detection network. Andrews' writing style is funny, wry, passionate, and deeply informed. How to Kill an Asteroid is one of the most entertaining pop-science reads of the year.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2024
Big asteroids rarely strike our planet, but smaller ones not so rarely, and scientists are worrying. Science journalist Andrews, author ofSuper Volcanoes, writes that an asteroid blew up over Chelyabinsk, a Russian city of 1.2 million, in 2013. Disintegrating before reaching the ground, it produced a vivid flash and deafening explosion that broke windows and damaged thousands of buildings. More than a hundred citizens were hospitalized. The explosion, equal to that of 500,000 tons of TNT, was caused by an asteroid 60 feet wide. History buffs remember the 1908 Tunguska meteor, which destroyed 800 square miles of remote Siberia, flattening 80 million trees with a blast equivalent to that of 12 million tons of TNT. It was 160 feet across. Surprise asteroids thrill movie audiences, but astronomers have detected most of the big ones. On the other hand, readers may be startled to learn that of the several hundred thousand Tunguska-size asteroids that astronomers call "near-Earth objects (NEOs)" (they're also called "city killers") thought to exist, only 7 percent have been found. Having set the scene, Andrews describes a NASA mission, DART, to send a spacecraft crashing into a distant NEO to shift its orbit. Launched in November 2021, it successfully completed its mission the following September, proving that this could be done. Andrews describes other missions to asteroids and comets, as well as ongoing NASA efforts at planetary defense, although readers may be dismayed to learn these are not a priority. A high-tech satellite, NEO Surveyor, designed to detect the mass of undetected asteroids, was proposed in the early 2000s, approved after many delays, and scheduled to launch by 2028, but that date became uncertain when its budget was cut. A member of the "science is boring" school, Andrews writes breezy prose peppered with flippant asides, jokes, and apologies for technical terms, but he has done his homework. A skillful review of NASA efforts to save the Earth.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 16, 2024
Journalist Andrews (Super Volcanoes) serves up a rollicking study of scientific efforts to prevent asteroids from striking Earth. The narrative chronicles the development and successful execution of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, a mission that changed the orbit of the small asteroid Dimorphos by crashing a van-size spacecraft into it in 2022. Andrews describes the technical wizardry that went into making the spacecraft (it would travel too far from Earth to pilot manually, so it was outfitted with an automated guidance system adapted from ballistic missiles) and offers a tense firsthand account of what it was like inside Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which partnered with NASA on the mission, during the countdown to impact (“Some people were rigid as stone; others vacillated as if affected by an earthquake”). Discussions of what Hollywood gets wrong about doomsday scenarios amuse, as when Andrews explains that using an uncrewed spacecraft to deliver nukes for detonation on an asteroid’s surface would have made more sense than the manned drilling missions in Armageddon and Deep Impact. Andrews’s sharp eye for detail captures the expertise and eccentricity of scientists involved in the DART mission, such as when he notes that the larger asteroid Dimorphos orbited was sometimes depicted as the Death Star in simulations. It’s a surprisingly fun report on averting catastrophe. Photos.