“Don’t Look Up” still required NASA expertise – The HuffPost

CINEMA – A comet is about to destroy civilization. However, that does not seem to worry anybody. This wacky storyline is from Netflix’s new blockbuster Don’t Look Up. This big budget film by Adam McKay starring Jennifer lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio is online this Friday, December 24.

In this satirical comedy from the director of The Big Short, the first plays the character of Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral student in astronomy uncomfortable in public. The second, a professor a little taken aback by the discovery of his student. Together, they will try to convince public opinion that a planet ten kilometers in diameter is about to collide with Earth.

The mission is far from easy. Especially when the President of the United States, played by a Meryl Streep completely indifferent to this announcement and not very sensitive to the dangerous nature of the thing, prefers to see the meteorite crash to extract its precious mineral resources.

Mission: locate the asteroids

Catastrophe is imminent and no one wants to look up to the sky. Worse, millions of Americans are flocking to the streets to demonstrate against this idea. The story may seem delusional. He is. However, in addition to the deliberate analogy with the climate crisis, it also required the expertise of a great figure from NASA. Her name? Amy Mainzer.

Principal investigator within the NEOWISE monitoring mission of the space agency, her mission is to locate potentially dangerous asteroids and comets, ”namely small objects in the solar system, the term ‘small’ being relative of course, which are likely to come closer to the Earth, or even to hit it as sometimes happens, ”she explains in the production notes.

Her contribution as an advisor to artistic and technical teams is not so trivial. First, because she does the same job as the heroes. Also, because it is his own story that has, in part, inspired Don’t Look Up: In March 2020, Professor Mainzer and his team discovered a comet, the brightest in the Northern Hemisphere since 1997.

A concrete testimony

Adam McKay contacted her. “I immediately understood that his film was about how humans react to an existential threat that requires solid and serious scientific knowledge,” she breathes. The scientist is quickly convinced by the project. Its goal: to tell in a concrete and realistic way how asteroids are discovered and how scientists communicate them to populations.

She takes an example. “In 2008, we discovered an asteroid within 24 hours of its impact,” recalls the researcher. Within 24 hours, the whole world was informed and over 500 observers sent hundreds of information. The asteroid has finally finished its course over the desert in Sudan. The object was actually very small in size (about the size of a Volkswagen combi), but astronomers are really trying hard. And that’s what we see in the film. ”

How to react when we make such a discovery? How to announce it around you? These questions that Leonardo DiCaprio asked him gave rise to good conversations on the subject, she explains to the site Space. Together, they reflected on what it was like to try to make a difference when you know something. Should we then work hand in hand with the government? Or fight against the system?

Behind its hilarious nature, the feature film has a lot to say about the importance of science in our societies, according to her. This “is really important in our daily life, concedes Amy Mainzer, interviewed by The verge. Even if we don’t necessarily think about it, it is there. It acts on our lives, on the physical processes that determine how the world works. […] We’ve seen it every day since the start of the pandemic, or with regard to climate change. ”

Cinema to popularize

The astronomer, who appears regularly in the US media in a popular science campaign, “really hopes that people will take science into account when making their decisions, both as individuals and as a society. If we use the scientific tools at our disposal, we are much more likely to achieve good results in our daily life. ”

These words do not come out of nowhere. They obviously recall the various positions held in the past by Donald Trump, sometimes resistant to Covid-19 vaccines, wary of climate change, and even of benefits of sport about health.

This is where cinema comes in. “You know, continues the scientist, still at The verge, science makes us discover the nature of the world around us, whether good or bad. The arts really allow us to process what we learn about it, to pass it on to others, to help them understand it. This helps us get out of it, not just as scientists, but as individuals. ” Don’t Look Up can he succeed in this mission? NASA hopes so.

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