Asteroid nomenclature is regulated by the International Astronomical Union, based in Paris, and vanity naming, Mainzer said recently, is “one of the perks” of her field.
She is the principal investigator for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission , which NASA calls “the largest space-based asteroid-hunting project in history,” and teaches at the University of Arizona.
Many attendees were relieved that the professor and the student didn’t have a romantic subplot.
Mainzer had pushed for a longer interval between discovery and impact, since you’d want four or five years to build a comet-busting spacecraft, but, for dramaturgical reasons, McKay stuck with six months.
“Then the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at Caltech”—where Mainzer worked for sixteen years—“would calculate the impact trajectories,” she said.
One slide was labelled “Proper Level of Explosive Power.” A large comet would not, as McKay had written in the original script, break off pieces of the planet, but it would cause enough flaming debris, wildfires, and tsunamis to wipe out most species on Earth.
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