Look out! Here comes ‘Impact Earth’
Rice production shows what would happen if a comet hit near Houston

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

There’ll be no rest for the weary Patricia Reiff as the director of the Rice Space Institute dives headlong from a trip to India into final plans for the premiere of her latest production.

In this one, she destroys Houston.

	PATRICIA REIFF

The actual culprit is a comet — and an imaginary one at that. And to be honest, the razing of our fair city is only make-believe — for now.

Reiff, Rice’s peripatetic professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, returned this week from the other side of the planet, where she installed two Discovery Domes, including an inflatable portable planetarium in Mumbai and a digital upgrade to a fixed dome in Chennai. The domes, which bring lessons about the heavens to every place on Earth, have been delivered to 75 locations on six continents since Reiff and her partners at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS) built the first digital fixed dome in 1998 and the first portable in 2003.

Rice and the HMNS will deliver a somber message with their latest collaboration, a planetarium show produced by Reiff titled ”Impact Earth” that spells out the dangers asteroids and comets pose to the planet. In the climax, viewers will get an up-close-and-personal look at what would happen if a comet the size of Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994, landed in the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s just say it won’t be pretty.

So just how dangerous is Earth’s neighborhood? Can we prepare?

“Impact Earth” will attempt to answer those questions when the Burke Baker Planetarium premieres the show May 1, with a worldwide release to follow. The production is the last in a series funded by NASA and produced by Rice and the HMNS.

Asteroids hitting Earth are the stuff of B-movie legend, but that makes the peril no less real. “There have been Hollywood movies about comets and asteroids hitting Earth, like ‘Deep Impact’ and ‘Armageddon,’ but they were not fully scientific in their explanations and animations,” said Carolyn Sumners, vice president of astronomy and physics at the museum and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at Rice.

Reiff said “Impact Earth” sets the record straight. “Our program has been vetted by numerous experts on asteroids, and even though they don’t always agree with each other, they agreed our presentation is accurate.”

The show explores major impacts in Earth’s history and recreates a meteorite fall on the Great Plains 10,000 years ago (with a large chunk of the actual meteorite, found in Kansas, on display at the planetarium entrance), the explosive event in Siberia’s Tunguska region in 1908 and the impact that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The production also takes viewers to visit asteroid hunters at the museum’s George Observatory to see how they locate asteroids that might pose a threat to the planet.

Narrator Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and four-time space shuttle astronaut, explains in the production that millions of space wanderers — leftover bits and pieces from the solar system’s formation more than 4 billion years ago — lurk among the planets.

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One such space rock is already raising concerns. On Friday, April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis will come within 18,000 miles of the Earth — closer than the geostationary satellites that monitor the weather and carry television signals. The impact of an asteroid the size of Apophis could wipe out a city or cause a devastating tsunami.

That gave Reiff and her crew the perfect excuse to visualize just such an event for the finale of “Impact Earth.”

She expects the show won’t be the last with HMNS. ”This is a partnership that’s been very, very deep over the years,” Reiff said. ”I helped design the sundial that’s at the museum 20 years ago, and Rice helped get George Observatory (in Brazos Bend State Park, south of Houston) going. There’s been a long history of cooperation between Rice and the museum.

”We’ve got a proposal into NASA for the next couple of shows, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

Tickets for ”Impact Earth” are available at www.HMNS.org or by calling 713-639-4629.

On-campus members of the Rice Space Institute and off-campus RSI Associates will be invited to special showings. Sign up at http://rsi.rice.edu.