The citizens must defend the earth.
Unistellar
A man showed up at my door a few weeks ago.
He wore a large elongated backpack and looked at the whole world like a millennial Ghostbuster.
And then I remember what’s going on. I saw this caption: “Help defend the planet by locating infamous asteroid apophis!” and was, of course, intrigued.
Actually, it was my wife who got even more excited. She is a scientist whose idea of relaxation is to browse through Space Instagram.
The serious warning for planetary defense – and encouragement for civilian scientists to come together for humanity – came through a company called Unistellar.
It’s the maker of the eVscope, a digital telescope with ‘unprecedented power and simplicity’. If only America could claim the same.
Many telescopes just do not see as much. My wife’s basic Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ struggles terribly with clouds.
The creators of the eVscope claim that it can see much more.
This is where it can be centrally useful this Sunday at 23.50. This is when the Asteroid of the Earth 99942 Apophis passes in front of a star and is visible, says the Observatoire de Paris, along a path that is detected from about northwest to southeast of the USA.
Unistellar asks a disturbing question about this asteroid: “Will it destroy spacecraft and satellites, or make catastrophic, direct contact with Earth?”
PR fluff and bunkum, for sure. And anyway, this potentially dangerous asteroid is supposed to (vaguely) come our way only in 2029.
But I wanted to see for myself if this telescope could make a difference for people to detect it on Sunday, just in case.
Movement is not easy at the moment, which is why I have Unistellar’s chief scientific officer, dr. Franck Marchis, asked if he would put himself on our deck, sip a glass of wine at a social distance (Cabernet Franc, of course), get something to eat and demonstrate. the company’s portable digital telescope.
Dr. Marchis slips off his backpack just as comfortably as he sips on his Cabernet. He sets up the telescope within apparent seconds.
He then demonstrated how to control it with your iPhone.
He calls and obeys the telescope.
The manufacturers of the eVscope make strange claims. Unistellar says that this portable thing is 100 times more powerful than an ordinary telescope.
However, the results were extraordinary. Says my wife.
You see, the clouds came over, but she still announced with a rare excitement, “I just saw Orion’s penis!” This is apparently how some astronomers wonderfully refer to Orion’s nebula.
The eVscope determines any object in the sky so you can stare at it and realize how insignificant a spot in the sky you are.
When I looked through the viewfinder, I admit that it was the sharpest and most impressive image I had seen through a telescope.
There is, of course, a slight drawback with this machine. It costs about $ 2,999. This is not the kind of sum that every civil defender of the planet can offer.
Yet I have dr. Marchis asked what the chances were that Apophis would bring some apocalypse to one or two satellites – or even to our planet.
“We can not answer this until we have a refined orbit of Apophis,” he told me.
Oh, but come on. Scare us a little Doctor Marchis.
“Currently, in 2029, its orbit will place it within the geosynchronous orbit, less than 36,000 km from Earth,” he said. “It will therefore cross this virtual sphere of about 400 satellites twice. However, its orbit is inclined from the equator, so the probability of an impact is small. If the orbit brings it even closer to Earth, the probability of an impact. will increase because we have more satellites at a lower orbit. “
We were warned, and dr. Marchis must know. He actually had an asteroid named after him.