Asteroid Discovery Read online

  Chapter 20

  Thursday, April 5

  Dog Island

  Florida Panhandle

  Eventually the raucous exchange died down. Pop finished up his baking and filled the tummies of his three hungry taste-testers. He loaded up all of his baked goods in large Tupperware containers and made the twenty-minute drive back to the east end of Dog Island, where he had a one-story bungalow facing the mainland.

  Cam and Bear helped Gunner clean up the kitchen, and eventually the trio was ready to relax on the upstairs deck with the Yeti cooler and another dozen beers on ice.

  Four Adirondack chairs were spread across the deck, separated by short wooden tables. Between Gunner and Bear, a cigar ashtray was set out as the guys fired up a pair of Macanudos.

  They exchanged small talk, and eventually, as the skies grew pitch black, the stars emerged in their full glory, together with the spectacle that had captured the world’s attention—Comet Oort.

  “What do you y’all think of this comet?” asked Bear as he let out a puff of smoke that momentarily obscured their view of the comet’s tail.

  The smoke dissipated and Gunner focused his eyes on the brightly lit comet. “It’s the brightest comet in recorded history. Theoretically, no comet can be brighter than magnitude twelve. The lower the magnitude, the brighter the star. From what I’ve heard on the news, Oort is emitting enough energy to send it closer to a magnitude ten.”

  Cam mustered the courage to ask, “Have you thought about pulling out her telescope? The Celestron might be a few years old, but you could get a better look.”

  The group fell silent for a moment, and then Gunner finished off his beer and set it on the deck with a thud. “No. If I wanna look into space, I’ll either watch it on television or go there myself.”

  Cam tilted up her bottle for another swig, then glanced over at her best friend. Gunner’s face was only illuminated by the cherry of his cigar. At Dog Island, the few residents who lived there respected the sea turtles who nested along the white sands. The turtles frequently got confused by artificial light coming from the homes. As the saying went, dark sky at night, turtle’s delight. Gunner had not installed any lights on the exterior of the home and typically dimmed the interior lights as darkness set in.

  She pressed Gunner about the other day. “Is that what the plan was on Sunday? Fly until you couldn’t fly anymore?”

  Gunner shrugged and twirled another beer through his fingertips before screwing off the top. “Are you here to lecture me, Cam?” He tilted his head in her direction and made eye contact.

  “Nope, no lectures from me. Just genuine concern from a friend.”

  Gunner grimaced and nodded. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Keep it real, bud,” said Bear, whose bullshit meter just went into the red zone.

  “Okay, fine. I’ll admit that I kinda lost it there for a moment.”

  “What about your comms?” asked Bear. He and Cam were now tag-teaming Gunner in this interrogation.

  Gunner’s head snapped toward Bear. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Man, people talk. You know that. Why’d you shut off the comms?”

  Gunner took another drag on his cigar. “I didn’t want anybody to stop me. I knew that bird was capable of taking me well into the stratosphere, and I wanted to see what it was like for myself.”

  “You could’ve been killed,” said Cam, a hint of emotion in her voice.

  “I’m sorry, Cam. Really, I am. I mean, I regret this for many reasons. Dying was part of it. Here’s what I learned from my joyride.”

  Gunner paused and stood to stroll around the deck. He leaned against the deck’s railing to face his team as he continued. “Guys, I don’t want to die. I know that now. I do have something to live for. Many things, in fact. There’s Pop and Howard. Those two need me. And then there’s you guys. I had a lot of time to think as I was falling back to Earth, um, well, after the main chute opened, anyway. You two are my family, and I’d be lettin’ you down if I screwed around and killed myself.”

  “Yes, you would have,” said Cam, who’d recently received an elevation in rank to major. “If you die, they would most likely put me in charge of our little unit. That means I’ve got to deal with Bear on my own.”

  “Oh, lawd!” the Texan groaned.

  “That would never work, would it?” said Gunner with a laugh. He truly enjoyed his friends and trusted them with his life. “Here’s the good news. I’m grounded for a while, but for flight combat missions only. I’m still in the game for special ops stuff.”

  Cam sat up on the edge of her chair. “The shrink cleared you?”

  “Well, sort of,” Gunner explained. “He and I have a pretty good understanding of what he expects from me, and in exchange, he coached me through my dressing-down by the colonel.”

  Cam smiled, stood, and gave Gunner a hug. Bear lifted his hefty frame out of the Adirondack chair and offered his beer to toast. The three clinked their bottles.

  Bear started by saying, “Day by day.”

  Followed by Cam. “Minute by minute.”

  Then Gunner joined in. “Ride or die.”

  Lastly, they put the exclamation on their small unit’s motto.

  “We stick together.”

  Chapter 21

  Five Years Prior

  Dog Island

  “Come on, Gunner! Check this out!” Heather Fox ran down a well-worn path onto the beach with an excitement befitting a young child. She and Gunner had made numerous trips to their newly purchased seven-acre tract that ran from the beach to the bay. The barrier island stretched parallel to the shoreline, roughly four miles from where Highway 98 ran along the coast. They were scheduled to start construction on their new home the next day when they realized they’d never spent any time on their beach at night. On a whim, the two sped along the backroads to Tallahassee’s Walmart and bought a tent, a sleeping bag large enough for them and Howard, together with some miscellaneous camping gear.

  Earlier, Gunner had barely brought their Hummer H1 to a stop at the ferry landing, which carried residents from Carrabelle to Dog Island. He had been focused on unloading the truck when Heather raced toward the water taxi launch.

  “Wait up!” he’d shouted after her, knowing full well that his plea would be ignored. Heather loved Dog Island. She saw it as a place of refuge where the two of them could shut out the busy world that ordinarily surrounded them.

  Gunner had stumbled down the dock, carrying the gear and a cooler by himself. Heather, realizing that she’d abandoned her husband, trotted back and helped relieve some of the load.

  Because Dog Island wasn’t connected to the mainland by road, residents generally opted to use the water taxis to get back and forth. As part of his agreement to move to the barrier island, he’d negotiated with Heather to buy a boat, one that could be used to travel into Eglin. The two shook hands on the arrangement and later closed on the property.

  After the thirty-minute ride across the bay, they were dropped off at the dock on Dog Island, and borrowed a golf cart, the primary means of transportation to travel from the airport on the east end of the island to the state park on the west end overlooking St. George Island.

  Gunner pulled onto their property and Heather was off to the races. “Come on!” she enthusiastically shouted to him.

  After securing Howard with a leash, the two of them stumbling slightly in the soft white sand, Gunner finally reached the dunes and made his way through the tall grasses that provided the shoreline protection from storm surges. Heather, her long hair flowing in the Gulf breezes, stood still, gazing across the eerily still waters, admiring the reflection of a full moon.

  “Just look at this, Gunner.” She paused and took in the scene. It was if the two of them had walked into a still photograph of the famous nature photographer Simone Bramante.

  Gunner wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and nuzzled into her neck, causing her to shiver. He was deeply in love with Heather an
d admired her zest for life.

  “I love you,” he whispered in his wife’s ear as his eyes took in the beauty of their surroundings.

  “I love you back.”

  He took her by the hand and they began to stroll along the water’s edge, which was beginning to chill as fall set in. It was completely silent except for the gentle lapping of waves along the shore. The breezes caused the sawgrass to whisper, voices of nature acting as the couple’s tour guide.

  Heather stopped and pointed toward the moon. With no ambient light that ordinarily pollutes the sky, every star shined bright, and the sun’s reflection off the moon was almost blinding.

  Gunner took it in, speaking in a low whisper in reverence for the moment. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you know, up there.”

  Heather squeezed his hand. “Despite all I know, and what I’ve experienced, the universe never ceases to amaze me. Think about it, stars, planets, and moons—they’re always where they should be. Night after night, same place. They do this complex dance around one another, performing flawlessly in a rendition of Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity.”

  His wife shuddered as a cool wind washed over them, and Gunner hurried to wrap his arms around her. She hadn’t been feeling well, and he was concerned this outing in the cool night air might be a little much for her. Yet she insisted on spending the night at the beach.

  Heather continued to soak it in, allowing her thoughts to randomly pour out of her. “Sometimes, the universe gets out of whack. Like Mercury. Its orbit varies a little bit every year but not enough to impact the other planets. Newton noticed it, but it was Einstein who explained how the Sun’s incredible gravity pulls and tugs on the tiny oblong planet.

  “And then there are the parts of the heavens that go rogue. The comets and asteroids—aimless wanderers, nomads really, that don’t have a home. They don’t have a partner to dance with, so they search until they find one.

  “They get dislodged from the asteroid belt, or they come from the far reaches of our solar system, drawn to the center by the Sun and then thrown back out by a slingshot effect. Astronomers are transfixed on what lies beyond our solar system. We should be studying these celestial nomads that are nearby, lurking in the vast darkness around us.”

  Gunner hugged his wife, once again pressing his face into her neck. He wanted to build this home for her. So she could stare at the sky. So she could wonder about what’s up there. So they could grow old together with their toes in the sand.

  Chapter 22

  Thursday, April 5

  Minor Planet Center

  Cambridge, Massachusetts

  It had been an extraordinarily long day at the MPC. Director Hapwell had consumed a pot of caffeine-rich coffee, although her adrenaline did plenty to keep her moving. As the day wore on and the data was analyzed, there was no mistaking the conclusion—the modern world was facing a threat like no other.

  Hapwell had spent years studying the skies and the historical record on how Earth had been pummeled in the past. Impact events, the terminology used by scientists to define collisions between celestial objects, regularly occur throughout the solar system. The most frequent impact events were between asteroids, comets, and meteoroids, with negligible effects. Larger planets have an atmosphere that help defend themselves from these random attacks of astronomical objects.

  Throughout Earth’s history, impact events have been tied to the formation of the Earth-Moon system, commonly referred to as the Big Splash. This giant-impact hypothesis suggests that the Moon was formed out of the debris left over from a collision between Earth and another large planet, most likely Mars, some four and a half billion years ago.

  Other impact events are attributed to bringing water to our planet, establishing life on Earth, and destroying it as well, in the form of several mass extinctions. The most widely known impact at Chicxulub, sixty-six million years ago, was believed to be the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.

  In modern history, the extensively studied Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred in the forests of central Siberia, Russia. The event, believed to be an air burst of a meteor, created an explosion equivalent to thirty megatons of TNT. Eight hundred square miles of Siberian forest was flattened in seconds.

  Studies found that the meteoroid that exploded above the forest was between two and six hundred feet wide. Hapwell thumbed through the most recent calculations provided to her by the MPC team. This incoming asteroid measured more than a mile wide. The energy upon impact, at its projected sixty-thousand-mile-per-hour speed, would be beyond any nuclear weapon created by man, times several hundred.

  Hapwell knew the consequences of a direct hit of this magnitude, but she had to put that out of her mind for the moment. One thing at a time.

  She was concerned about this information being made public. When the woman had phoned in earlier in the day, the first thing that Hapwell thought about was how this would be treated in the media and how the public would react.

  She studied the raw footage and calculations sent to her by the Georgia woman via email. Three members of her team huddled in a small conference room and debated the accuracy of the information, but after further analysis, they marveled at how an amateur astronomer could be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of this newly discovered near-Earth object and then extrapolate some fairly accurate data from what she had to work with.

  Hapwell wondered if anyone else out there had caught a glimpse of the NEO and naturally confused it with the tail of Comet Oort. The comet had provided the perfect camouflage for the asteroid, making an already difficult task of identifying these threats even more so.

  The solar system was full of unconfirmed near-Earth objects. At any given time, the MPC and related entities were tracking eighteen to twenty thousand NEOs. Beginning in 1998, Congress mandated that NEOs of a kilometer or larger be tracked, but after recognizing the threat that even small objects posed, the requirement was modified in 2005 to include objects as small as five hundred feet.

  Hapwell, who had been making her way through the ranks of NASA during those years, applauded the increased observation in the skies. In 2005, the budget for asteroid research was twelve million dollars. Decades later, the budget was less than the original twelve million despite a large increase to one hundred fifty million dollars in 2018.

  Systematic budget cuts came a few years ago, and as a result, staff salaries were frozen, causing mass defections to private entities like SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, and the Blue Origin project by Jeff Bezos. The private sector partnerships with two of the wealthiest people in the world had culminated in an outpost being established on the Moon.

  The task of monitoring near-Earth threats remained with the government, and the need for early warning systems resulted in the continued development of Pan-STARRS, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, in Hawaii. Supported by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, Pan-STARRS led the way in discovering and tracking near-Earth objects.

  Upon the discovery of an asteroid, telescopes around the world were designed to perform ground-based observations in various wavelengths, including near-infrared, radar, and those visible to the naked eye. All of these worldwide agencies made initial and follow-up observations, attempted to define the NEO’s precise orbit, and then coordinated their findings, generally through Director Hapwell and the MPC.

  Through technological advances and some of the brightest minds on the planet watching the skies, both professional and amateur, the MPC boasted a ninety percent success rate in identifying these threats to Earth. Overall, the odds of an asteroid impact event was considered small—about one in twelve hundred, or about the odds of drawing four-of-a-kind in a poker hand.

  To be sure, by any standard of measure, a ninety percent discovery rate could be seen as wildly successful. However, Hapwell, an occasional online poker player, knew it only took one planet-killing impact event to result in the end of the world as we know it.

&nb
sp; “Director Hapwell.” Padma Argawal interrupted her thoughts. Hapwell rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands and glanced up at the clock on her wall. It was five minutes until midnight. Her mind immediately wondered if the Doomsday Clock would strike twelve when the news of this asteroid hit the media. “I believe we’ve reached a consensus.”

  “Sit down,” said Hapwell, who stretched her arm across the desk to receive her copy of the report.

  “Ma’am, we utilized the ZTF at Palomar to survey the sky just beyond the last known coordinates provided by the lady in Georgia. We’ve got eyes on it, ma’am.”

  The Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California was designed to pan the skies for objects that rapidly changed in brightness, like gamma ray bursts and supernovae. In this case, the MPC used it to cut through the light noise generated by Comet Oort to isolate the asteroid and its unusual tail.

  “Smart thinking, Padma. Tell me what you’ve found.”

  “I’ll skip the orbital elements and other parameters and bottom-line it for you. Size is irregular with a maximum width of one-point-two miles. The Earth MOID can only be measured in days, as the AU value is miniscule.”

  The Earth MOID, or minimum orbit intersection distance, was usually calculated in astronomical units because the discovery of large asteroids was typically years in advance.

  “Four, twenty-seven,” mumbled Hapwell. “Location?”

  “Northern Hemisphere, precise location to be determined.”

  “Padma, it won’t matter.”

  Chapter 23

  Thursday, April 5

  Mary Willis Library

  Washington, Georgia

  Paranoid, and with good reason, Sparky quickly moved behind the parked vehicles at city hall and found his way into a stand of newly leafed trees that marked the coming of spring in North Georgia. He considered his options and ruled out getting anyone else in town involved in his drama. His primary concern was his wife’s safety, but she was tough and resilient, perfectly capable of staring down anyone. He dashed along some overgrown azalea bushes until he came to nearby South Jefferson, where he paused to view the traffic.