Keeping Earth safe one comet at a time

Don't Look Up In theatres and on Netflix

Amy Mainzer has a confession: “I'm probably the only asteroid scientist on the planet who has not seen either Armageddon or Deep Impact.” Shocking, given that she was a consultant on the film Don't Look Up, advising on everything from cometary orbital calculations to how the film's astronomers, played by Leonardo Dicaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, might dress.

Don't Look Up, directed and co-written by Adam Mckay, imagines what would happen if scientists discovered a comet on a collision course with Earth, with just six months before impact. It's a similar setup to the 1998 movies Deep Impact and Armageddon, both of which saw astronauts planning to blow the space rocks up.

Mainzer says Don't Look Up has strong science in it, but not everything is true. “We go right into the realm of science fiction immediately, because we don't know of any comet that's headed on a collision course to Earth, full stop,” she explains. “Fortunately, these kinds of global events are extremely, extremely rare. So right off the bat that's kind of the main difference between fact and fiction.”

And if we were to discover a comet with a six-month window to stop it? The story wouldn't end happily. Last May, experts from NASA staged an exercise in which they imagined a Don't Look Up scenario. Their conclusion: With five to 10 years' warning, we might deflect or destroy such a threat. With six months, there'd be no chance.

Mainzer is doing the real work of keeping Earth safe, using telescopes to discover and track asteroids and comets. As principal investigator of NASA'S Near-earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, she and her team discovered Comet Neowise. The last time it passed this way, the pyramids were being topped out. It'll be several thousand more years before it returns.