A guide to contemporary doomsday scenarios — from the threats you know about to the ones you never think of
A few days before NASA tried to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid as part of what it called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, I talked to Lindley Johnson, the agency’s planetary defense officer. I think we can all agree that this sounds like an important job.
The planetary defense officer focuses on the detection of dangerous asteroids and comets that might threaten the Earth (as in the movies “Don’t Look Up” and “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact”), and explores technologies for preventing such a thing from happening. This job is not to be confused with the NASA planetary protection officer, who is supposed to keep Earth’s microbes from contaminating other worlds or hypothetical alien microbes from coming to Earth, as in “The Andromeda Strain.”
