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Citizens must defend the Earth.
Unistellar
A man came to my door a few weeks ago.
He carried a large oblong backpack and searched the world like a millennial Ghostbuster.
And then I remembered what was going on. I had seen this headline: “Help defend the planet by detecting the infamous asteroid Apophis!” and was understandably intrigued.
In fact, it was my wife who was even more moved. She’s a scientist whose idea of relaxation is to scroll through Space Instagram.
The terrible warning about defending the planet – and encouraging citizen scientists to come together for humanity – came from a company called Unistellar.
He is the creator of the eVscope, a digital telescope that has “unprecedented power and simplicity”. If only America could claim the same.
Many telescopes just can’t see much. My wife’s basic Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ struggles terribly with clouds.
The creators of the eVscope claim that it can see a lot more.
This is where it can come in handy this Sunday at 11:50 p.m. central time. This is when the near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis passes a star and is visible, says the Paris Observatory, along a path traced roughly from the northwest to the southeast of the United States.
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, surely. And anyway, this potentially dangerous asteroid isn’t supposed to come (vaguely) our way until 2029.
But I wanted to see for myself if this telescope could make a difference to people by spotting it on Sunday, just in case.
The move isn’t easy at the moment, so I asked Unistellar’s Scientific Director, Dr Franck Marchis, if he would perch on our patio, sip a glass of socially distant wine (Cabernet Franc, naturally). , find something to eat and demonstrate. the company’s portable digital telescope.
Dr. Marchis slipped his backpack with the same ease as he sipped his Cabernet. He set up the telescope in seconds.
Then he showed how you can control it with your iPhone.
He tilted and the telescope obeyed.
The makers of the eVscope are making silly claims. Unistellar says this portable thing is 100 times more powerful than a regular telescope.
The results, however, have been extraordinary. Said my wife.
You see, the clouds have come, but she still announced with rare excitement: “I just saw Orion’s penis!” This is apparently how some astronomers happily refer to the Orion Nebula.
The eVscope spots any object in the sky so you can look at it and realize how insignificant you really are in the sky.
When I peeked into the viewfinder, I admit it was the sharpest, most imposing image I had seen through a telescope.
There is, of course, a slight downside with this machine. It costs about $ 2,999. This is not the kind of sum that every citizen defender of the planet can offer.
Still, I asked Dr. Marchis what the odds were that Apophis would bring a little apocalypse to one or two satellites – or even our planet.
“We can’t answer that until we have a refined Apophis orbit,” he told me.
Oh, but come on. Scare us a little Dr Marchis.
“Currently, its orbit places it inside geosynchronous orbit, less than 36,000 km from Earth, in 2029,” he said. “It will therefore cross this virtual sphere of about 400 satellites twice. However, its orbit is tilted away from the equator, so the probability of an impact is low. If its orbit brings it even closer to Earth, then the probability of impact will increase as we have more satellites in lower orbit. “
We’ve been warned, and Dr Marchis should know. He actually has an asteroid named after him.
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