Gary Brown: Skipping rocks in space

"Smack!" "Crash!" "Slam!" "Bang!" "Splat!"

I have no idea if any of those words come close to reproducing the sound that occurred when the NASA spacecraft "Dart" zeroed in on and struck an asteroid at about 14,000 mph last week. When I watched the spacecraft strike the asteroid, which was in an orbit around what one news report called a "companion space rock,” the video from millions of miles away was accompanied by no sound.

They didn't even show those cheap graphics – "Boff! Bonk! Pow! – that were displayed on the TV screen back in the 1960s during cheesy fight scenes of old "Batman" episodes.

All I saw was an approaching rocky surface – although I guess through the camera on the spacecraft I was sort of approaching it – and then when the craft made contact it faded to a red screen.

"Poof!"

So, I have no idea what the sound was. You'd think for more than $325 million, which was the cost of what by anyone's definition is a pretty expensive game of interstellar target practice, we'd at the least get a little audio.

The sound might have been "Bang!" Maybe "Thud!"

I'm thinking "Ping!" After all, the thing we sent up there was a giant hunk of metal hitting solid rock.

Getting terminology correct

Technically, the space mission wasn't just target practice. It was called a "planetary defense test" in the media, and NASA has even more formal sounding terminology for it.

"The 1,260-pound Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or DART, collided with the estimated 11-billion-pound, 520-foot-long asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 mph about 7 million miles from Earth. The spacecraft hit about 55 feet from the asteroid's center," reported USA Today, quoting NASA statistics.

The spacecraft struck the asteroid in a spot that wasn't quite a bulls-eye, but was darn close. It would score some points in any ordinary dart game.

And, let's face it, that was not an easy target to hit. Playing golf, I've missed fairways almost as big as that and I'm not 7 million miles away. I'm looking down at the grass from the tee box and I've veered right or left into the trees even though the fairway was not even moving.

Using the terminology of old PGA golf ads: "These scientist guys are good..."

So, the sound of "DART" hitting Dimorphos definitely isn't one that I'm familiar with, such as the sound I hear when my ball strikes a tree.

"Thwack!" "Whomp!

And that last one is just my club head slamming the ground after I realize what I've achieved.

The value of space tests

Which leaves us with only a few remaining questions.

One, why did we have to call Dimorphos and the larger asteroid around which it orbits, Didymos, by hard-to-pronounce Greek-sounding names, instead of simply naming them after the guys who discovered them? Didymos could be Joe and the other one could be Peter.

Two, did we actually accomplish what we set out to do? Did the "DART" strike actually change the orbit of Dimorphos? A really good shot in regular darts is satisfying, but if you eventually still lose the game and have to buy your opponent a beer, have you actually achieved anything? I'm not trying to bring us down, but even scientists say it will be awhile before we know if the space test did anything." Down the road, if an asteroid bears down on our collective noggin, scientists still may owe each of us taxpayers a cold one.

Three, even if we did change the orbit of Dimorphos a little, isn't the object we hit, relatively speaking, just an itty-bitty space rock? It's so small we could almost pick it up and skip it across space, the way we skipped rocks on a pond during our childhood. What happens when a giant boulder of an asteroid comes barreling down on Earth? Will the sound we hear just be a tiny "Bink" before the "Boom"?

Finally, was it worth it? I know $325 million is just a drop in the bucket for space exploration. And, trust me, I'm a space guy. I loved throwing billions of dollars into the air just so we could watch Apollo 14 crew member Alan Shepard hit a golf ball with a 6-iron on the moon. I was mesmerized by every little thing juggled by astronauts in the zero-gravity of space capsules. Besides, we got a lot of long-range now-commonly-used products out of going into space. Who doesn't love Velcro?

It's just that we've got a lot problems we need work on at home first. Violence. Disease. War. Natural disasters. Social issues. The list goes on.

If we don't throw some money at those things and get them fixed, by the time any planet-destroying space rock decides to decend upon us, will Earth even be worth saving? Will the sound of success then be one hand clapping?

Reach Gary at gary.brown.rep@gmail.com. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Gary Brown: Skipping rocks in space