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Synopsis

What are the chances of being hit? Believe it or not you have as much chance of being killed by an asteroid, than dying in a plane crash. And yet there is currently no international body studying ways of protecting us from the worst possible catastrophe imaginable – the total destruction of our planet!

This film will piece together all the evidence and answer the most important question humankind has faced. When will this disaster strike?

Where is the proof?

You don’t need to search hard to look for proof of asteroid impact…….just look up at the moon! There are hundreds of craters which have hit, so where on earth? At some time in the ancient past, a rock about a mile and a half across, weighing 10 billion tons and travelling at two hundred times the speed of sound, ripped through the atmosphere and smashed into the earth’s surface. This was in Manson in Iowa and was the greatest impact ever to occur on the mainland United States……… but even this was not the largest to hit our planet. Sixty five million years ago, an asteroid six miles across crashed into the ground wiping out the dinosaurs. We assemble the evidence to prove that this crater wiped out the dinosaurs and answer the most important question. When will this disaster strike?

The Experiment?

We will not be waiting that long to find out what happens when asteroids or comets collide. Dan Durda, a senior research scientist at the Southwest Research institute in Boulder, Colorado will conduct experiments for the program, smashing rocks together to analyze just how small an asteroid has to be to cause global destruction with the help of NASA’s hyper velocity gas gun, Durda hopes to refine his radical plan to save the Earth.

Can we save ourselves?

We interview the B612 Foundation, Their aim is to send a spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid by 2015 and demonstrate their idea to settle the spacecraft on the edge of the asteroid and gently nudge it along. Luckily, it doesn’t take much of a push to turn a global-killer into a harmless piece of rock. The program also interviews Jay Melosh, a geologist from Arizona. His idea is to focus the Sun’s rays onto a point on the surface of the asteroid, super-heating it to blast that part of the asteroid away.

What will it do to us?

On the day that mankind dies, an asteroid traveling at 200 times the speed of sound will smash through the earth’s atmosphere, heating the air to ten times the temperature of the surface of the sun. One second later, the impact will blast 1000 cubic-meters of rock from the planet’s surface, sending a shock wave of superheated gas to flatten buildings, strip vegetation, set fire to the very earth; and kill every living thing within a radius of 200 miles

When will it happen?

This film analyses all of the evidence, all of the odds, and makes its prediction of the day that the world will end.

ASPECT RATIO 4.3
MAIN SOUNDTRACK English Stereo
DISC FORMAT DVD 5
REGION 1 NTSC
CLASSIFICATION Exempt
NOTE Not available for shipment outside the USA

Runtime: 54 minutes