By Nick Albicocco
With dozens of asteroid scientists in Washington DC this week for the semi-annual IAA Planetary Defense Conference, the university invited scientist and television personality Bill Nye, NASA chief scientist Jim Green and a panel of asteroid scientists to discuss the risk of asteroid impact and possible mitigation strategies.
The event, titled “Bill Nye and friends vs. The Asteroids,” was held on the evening of May 1 in the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center and featured an audience of children, students and budding scientists.
The night started with the world-famous “science guy” Nye, who, after introducing himself to the crowd, stated that he was there representing the Planetary society. The Planetary Society, for which Nye is CEO, is the “largest and most effective nonprofit organization that promotes the exploration of space,” according to their website.
Nye said he became interested in the Planetary Society after taking a class taught by Carl Sagan at Cornell University. He then veered into a discussion about asteroids, saying that the chance of an asteroid hitting Earth is 100 percent and that its impact “would be like control-alt-delete” to the region that it hits.
What are we going to do about an asteroid hitting us, Nye asked. “Well, if your an asteroid coming in from outer space from the north side of the solar system, you’ll probably hit Russia,” he said.
“Now and then an asteroid may fly by the Earth,” Nye said, as he displayed chronological charts showing the number of asteroids around our planet in 1999, 2009 and 2019. “If you looked for an asteroid with a telescope, you’d see nothing,” he added.
In his discussion on how scientists locate asteroids, Nye mentioned the Catalina Sky Survey, an astronomical survey, as well as a spacecraft equipped with an infrared camera. He finished his 30-minute talk by outlining other methods that scientists are using to identify asteroids in space. He then turned it over to Green.
“We have an enormous number of small bodies (in outer space),” said Green. “The mitigation strategies will only be effective if we know what the asteroids are made of.”
Green said that the large asteroids NASA has studied don’t seem like they will pose a problem for the next few hundred years; however, small asteroids out there may pose a problem to our planet.
After a brief question and answer segment between Nye and the audience, Mat Kaplan, the host of a talk radio show called Planetary Radio, led a panel with five renowned asteroid scientists about the threat asteroids pose to civilization.
Nye wrapped up the event by urging people to get involved in space policy or space exploration to help save the world.
According to Manharan Virk, Shivam Soni and Peter Stefans, all of which are juniors majoring in aerospace engineering, the event was interesting and successful.
“I really enjoyed it. It was fun even though I only came for Bill Nye,” said Virk.
“It was fun for sure. It was a little long though,” Soni said.
“It was pretty great to see Bill Nye, after seeing him as the science guy, and getting to hear his perspective,” said Stefans.