Science & Cinema: Armageddon

Armageddon (1998) is a sci-fi blockbuster whose most impressive achievement is how little science it even attempted to get right. When an asteroid on a crash course with Earth is discovered, NASA assembles a crack team of… miners? NASA routinely requires astronauts to perform all sorts of complicated assembly techniques, on orbit, in a spacesuit, on extremely sensitive and delicate flight hardware. In fact this is one of the reasons NASA recruits scientists with substantial education, they need to know that not only are the astronauts proficient with technical skills, they need to be able to learn new and sophisticated skills relatively quickly, with no margin for error.

But setting this major cinematic crime aside, there’s some other flaws. Interestingly enough, the concept of an asteroid coming toward the Earth isn’t one of them. In fact, NASA is constantly monitoring the skies for Near Earth Objects, like asteroids. In 2018 the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully visited an asteroid and is in the process of returning a sample to Earth. Read more about it here:

OSIRIS-REx

OSIRIS-REx will travel to a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu, reaching its target in 2018. The spacecraft will collect a 2.1-ounce sample for return to Earth in 2023.

 

Now that we’ve actually visited an asteroid, you can see detailed images on the surface, and compare that to the asteroid’s surface as imagined in Armageddon. To be fair, no such images existed when the film was released in 1998!

The scene in Armageddon that depicts the landing on the asteroid is cartoonishly unrealistic, with nothing but chaos and blind luck bringing the crew to a stop on the surface. In reality, rendezvous with any object in space, spacecraft or celestial bodies, are carefully planned strategic events. If you’ve ever watched an event like this, the mission controllers are incredibly focused and attentive, panic-driven decision making would serve no purpose and at worst probably risk the success of the mission. Years of planning and contingency mapping go into every mission to all but eliminate the need for impulsive, last-minute emergencies. Though missions don’t always go according to plan, it looks very different. We’ll talk more about this next week!

For reference, here’s Armageddon:

And here’s what a real asteroid landing looks like in Mission Control:

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