The Asteroid Hunter

This is Love - Vox Media Podcast Network

Astronomer David Rankin, a nighttime observer at the Catalina Sky Survey, shares his journey from childhood stargazing in Utah to discovering asteroids and contributing to planetary defense. His work highlights humanity'

Key takeaways

• Asteroid detection relies on public and amateur contributions

Transcript preview

Support for this is love comes from fetch pet insurance. Every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over a thousand dollars. Fetch pet insurance can help. Fetch is a complete pet insurance for dogs and cats. You get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use fetch for any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetch pet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetch pet. save. In 1993, astronomers discovered something orbiting Jupiter. It was a comet that had been broken into many pieces by Jupiter's gravity. Some scientists described it looking like a string of pearls. It didn't take long for them to realize that the comet was on track to smash right into Jupiter. And it just raised a lot of eyebrows because it was the first time in human history that we'd seen one of these. really intense, potentially catastrophic impacts happening in the solar system. It kind of scared a lot of people, I think. The comet fragments crashed into Jupiter over a period of several days, with the combined force of 300 million atomic bombs. One of the impact scars left a hole in the atmosphere of Jupiter, the upper atmosphere that was the size of Earth. You know, if something like that had hit the the Earth it would be devastating to all life. One NASA scientist called the collision a punch in the gut and said that it was the wake-up call that we needed to be monitoring asteroids in comets in the solar system. Congress directed NASA to start finding and cataloging Neos, or near-Earth objects, that were one kilometer or wider. Today, David Rankin works as a nighttime observer. at the Catalina Sky Survey, at the top of Mount Lemon, outside Tucson, Arizona. So an observer's job is to sit at the telescope all night, from sundown to sun up. In the summertime, that's real nice because the nights are short, but in the wintertime night, that's a 12-hour night. And you're up all night, just hunting asteroids. That's your full-time job. Do you know what, this is going to be? This is a public service episode. This is the man that we need to be. to hazardous asteroids coming at us. Yeah. I'm Phoebe Judge and this is love. Must think sometimes looking up or when the telescope register something that could be something that's so big that it could kill millions of people and I'm going to be the first person who put my eyes on it. So it's always in the back of your mind. I promise this is true for all the observers. We all know in the back of our mind somewhere that we could be the person that picks up the object that's going to really do some damage. But I think all of us have a pretty healthy respect for the fact that the odds of that happening are pretty low. David Rankin grew up in a small town in southern Utah with around 500 people. I mean, we were probably five hours from the next large city. And the skies I grew up under in southern Utah were, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I They're ink black. It's just hard to explain how dark it gets down there during a new moon and when the sky is clear. You can you can look out into the night sky under those type of conditions and it just feels like the universe is going to pluck you off the earth. It's almost a sense of vertigo. The skies are so dark and you can easily see the Milky Way rising and setting and it's hard to, I'd say it's hard to grow up in an area like that and not just be fascinated and have a connection with a nice guy, which is what most people had throughout human history. David remembers spending hours as a kid, just looking up at the stars. He'd go up on the roof of their trailer, sometimes by himself, sometimes with his siblings. Even as kids, you know, we would know constellations, like, oh, that's Casaopia, oh, that's a Sagittarius, or, you know, like you would just kind of learn them because you would see them so often. When he was about 12, he looked up and saw something he'd never seen before. I just remember being a kid running around the neighborhood at night and seeing this giant flashlight hanging in the sky. I would pause and just look at it. Like, what is going on there? It looked like somebody just had a flashlight in the sky. David's father told him it was a comet. This comet was what you would call like a once a century type comet. You know, it was, uh, just got extremely bright. So comets, they come from very far away, and they can be on orbits that are, you know, millions of years. So this just happened to be a really interesting comet that hadn't come through for thousands of years. Comets are made up of ice and dust, materials left over from the formation of the solar system. They orbit the sun. Most of them originate from very far away, but some can be seen from Earth at certain points of their orbits. This means that some of the comets we've discovered have been seen by humans before and will be seen again. It just might take thousands or even millions of years. As one astronomer has put it, quote, a periodic comet is a giant pendulum clock in the sky. Every swing is not a few seconds, but many human civilizations, rising and falling. The comet that David saw as a kid was called Hailbop. A reporter wrote that the last time it had been visible from Earth, quote, The grandeur of Rome and Athens lay centuries in the future. The Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs were yet to be. The Plow was just coming into widespread use in Europe, where settled agriculture was still a novelty and cities, unheard of. Some people believe there could be a reference to this particular comet in an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh's tomb. Hieroglyphs, referring to a star with long hair. In the 90s, it was visible to the naked eye for 18 months. It was so bright it could even sometimes be seen in the daytime. Scientific American reported that websites posting photos and updates of the comet were popular that quote they're causing a traffic jam on the internet which was new at the time. David says growing up his family was fundamentalist Mormon. He says his father believed that the comet was a sign from the heavens. The next time Hale-Bop will be visible from Earth will be around the year 4,380. David never stopped thinking about that comet. One day he heard about a night another comet that was going to be visible from Earth. What was unusual about this one was the cloud of gas and dust around it. What's known as the coma had suddenly become much bigger. It had gone to what's known as an outburst and just this really beautiful blue giant coma blew up around this comet and that the gas cloud around the comet did get larger than the sun. It was briefly the largest object in the solar system. David decided he wanted to see it for himself. So I just, I just got online. and Google, how do I build a telescope? We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. makes the process a lot easier. You can see a licensed psychiatrist online who takes your insurance in just a few days. Talkiatry is 100% online psychiatry practice that provides valuations, diagnoses, and medication management for conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD, PTSD, insomnia, and more. Unlike therapy only platforms, talkiatry is psychiatry. You meet a medical provider who can diagnose mental health conditions and prescribe medication when it's a They have more