10-26-2023 Howard - Flipbook - Page 57
Ed Reynolds a program manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel. PHOTO BY CRAIG
WEIMAN/ JHUAPL
BY MIKE KLINGAMAN Howard Magazine
C
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket
launches with the Double
Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART,
spacecraft onboard, Nov. 23, 2021,
from Space Launch Complex 4E
at Vandenberg Space Force Base
in California. DART is the world’s
first full-scale planetary defense
test, demonstrating one method
of asteroid deflection technology.
The mission was built and is
managed by Johns Hopkins APL
for NASA’s Planetary Defense
Coordination Office. PHOTO BY
BILL INGALLS/NASA
ould an asteroid strike destroy
humankind? Not if Ed Reynolds can
help it.
Reynolds, of Ellicott City, led a NASA team
that built a spacecraft which, in 2022, targeted a
benign asteroid, hurtled 7 million miles through
the cosmos and struck the big rock, nudging
it off its orbit. The mission, dubbed DART
(Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was a
success and a first for NASA in its bid to create a
planetary defense against near-Earth objects.
For his efforts, Reynolds, 61, a program
manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory, in Laurel, was named one of Time
Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2023.
(Others included Beyoncé, Elon Musk and
Joe Biden.). The Baltimore Sun reached out to
Reynolds to talk space, asteroids and beyond.
If DART had struck the asteroid before it hit
Earth 66 million years ago, would it have
saved the dinosaurs?
Possibly. The dinosaurs were hit by a very,
very big asteroid, tens of kilometers in diameter,
while the thing we hit, Dimorphos, was the
size of a pyramid. If we had punched [the big
one], the change in its velocity would be so
microscopic that we’d have to wait thousands of
years for it to have made enough of an effect to
not strike Earth.
Has any rock in the cosmos drawn
a bead on our planet?
There are four near-Earth asteroids, each the
size of the dinosaur-killer, on trajectories that
could cross Earth’s path sometime in the future.
We know where they are, and that there’s no
danger of them actually hitting Earth.
The not-so-good news is that there are
dozens of smaller, near-Earth asteroids out
there, roughly the size of the one we hit with the
DART spacecraft, and we only know where half
of them are. But there’s a space mission going
up in a couple of years to provide a really good
mapping of those smaller ones — and that will
take away a lot of the worry.
Did the award by Time Magazine
surprise you?
I got an email from Time, offering
congratulations, but saying that the [winners’
names] were embargoed for a month. So I
was busting at the seams to tell someone, but
couldn’t.
At the Time reception, at Jazz at Lincoln
Center, we walked a red-carpet entrance before
about a hundred photographers. I don’t thrive
on attention, so I was thinking, “What is my
mouth doing? Am I awkward?” At one point,
I was standing there, with [celebrities] all
around, and I realized that if I extended my
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