Another asteroid near-miss: Devo sings "Space Junk"

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Today, February 15, another asteroid – 2012 DA14 – such an unattractive name! – will graze the earth. It will come within 17,200 miles of the earth’s surface, in fact – closer than some of our own communications satellites.

 

 

How do we let these things happen?

 

 

Oh, that’s right, we have no say in the matter one way or the other.

 

 

These things have been whizzing past us for eons. Some of them hit the earth, and then it’s an “Oh my goodness!” moment. (Check this link for what happened in Siberia about a hundred years ago.) And, if they’re a bit larger, you get something like an extinction event, as happened 60 million years ago near the Yucatan.

 

 

Today, however, we can give 2012 DA14 a wave and a smile.

 

 

And now, ladies and gentlemen, from almost forty years ago: Devo’s brilliant song “Space Junk.” I posted this song back in 2011, but who cares? It’s still a classic.

 

 

She was walking all alone 
Down the street in the alley 
Her name was Sally 
She never saw it hit
She was hit by space junk 

In New York Miami Beach 
Heavy metal fell in Cuba 
Angola Saudi Arabia 
On Christmas Eve said Norad
A Soviet Sputnik hit Africa 
India Venezuela

Texas Kansas
It's falling fast in Peru too 
It keeps coming 
And now I'm mad about space junk 
I'm all burned up about space junk 
Oh walk and talk about space junk 
It smashed my baby's head 
And now my Sally's dead 

 

 

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Asteroids

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Partner and I saw something interesting the other night. A near-earth asteroid, Apophis, was making a near approach to Earth, and we watched it in real time, on a British website called Slooh.com, which operates a powerful telescope in the Canary Islands off Africa.

 

 

The images were peaceful enough: a tiny bright spot moving slowly against a background of stars.

 

 

Apophis will not trouble us this time; it’s too far away.

 

 

But Apophis is coming back. It will make another near-Earth approach in 2029, and again in 2036. There is a vanishingly small chance that, in 2036, Apophis will actually hit the Earth.

 

 

If it does, it would not be quite as bad as the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit Earth sixty million years ago. It would be very bad, however.

 

 

But, as I said, the chances are very small.

 

 

Makes you feel uncertain, doesn’t it?

 

 

I don’t much care. In 2036, I’ll be 79 years old, if I’m not already dead.

 

 

But it makes me think of all the odd things that can happen, and the random horrible accidents that can really ruin your day.

 

 

And I used to like the asteroids.  I thought of them as a remote peaceful place, a planetary archipelago, kind of like the British West Indies.

 

 

I prefer them that way.

 

 

Here’s Diane Ackerman’s poem from the 1970s:

 

 

We imagine them

flitting

cheek to jowl,

these driftrocks

of cosmic ash

thousandfold afloat

between Jupiter and Mars.

Frigga,

Fanny,

Adelheid,

Lacrimosa.

Names to conjure with,

Dakotan black hills,

A light-opera

Staged on a barrier reef.

And swarm they may have,

Crumbly as blue-cheese,

That ur-moment

when the solar system

broke wind.

But now

they lumber

so wide apart

from each

to its neighbor’s

pinprick-glow

slant millions

and millions

of watertight miles.

Only in the longest view

do they graze

like one herd

on a breathless tundra. 

 

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