“Currently, there is no known asteroid with a significant probability of impacting Earth in the next century.” This reassuring news comes to us via NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), which last week conducted an exercise about a fictional asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. It didn’t go well for us. In conjuction with […]
News Flash: Deep Impact and Armageddon Might Not Reflect Actual Science
It sounds so intuitive, doesn’t it? If something massive is coming at you, break it up into smaller pieces. The smaller pieces won’t hurt as much, and whatever it is might miss you altogether. That’s the premise of both of the Great Asteroid Movies of 1998, but a new study tells us that not only […]
A Tale of Two Asteroid Movies
Vs. On July 1, 1988, Armageddon premiered in U.S. theaters. It would go on to earn more than $36 million in its opening weekend, on a budget of ~$210 million (all figures adjusted for inflation). Almost 2 months earlier, Deep Impact had earned more than $40 million […]