Day 269
DART (spacecraft) hits Dimorphos (moonlet). I don’t usually watch videos before I write, and I didn’t intend to this morning — although the last thing I saw before I went to sleep last night was the white pixels of Didymos approaching the surface of my laptop’s screen.
I was too tired to stay awake; I knew I could skip the video forward when I wanted to see what happened next.
But I have a swollen right thumb, with pus around the right edge of the fingernail. It may be an infected cuticle. I was leaving it out of this diary, as too yucky and not necessary to include, although it makes holding a pen majorly painful.
First thing, it needed pricking again (Leigh did it almost last thing), and to sterilize it I needed five minutes immersing it in hot salt water.
As I would be immobile, I decided to see if the NASA mission had been successful. No-one I know is as concerned and excited about this kind of space-thing as I am.
If an asteroid is eventually found heading directly for us, this will have been one of the most important days in human history — because we might have a clue to survival.
Also, I think the existential status of Dimoprhos — as with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko — changes with physical contact with an object that has had physical contact with a human hand. It has been touched by something we (however fraught a collective that is) have touched.
And so I sat at my desk, thumb stinging like bum in a small pyrex glass, and watched the countdown — the blob became a landscape became a whoa-fuck became a rockface became a red wall with just a slice of black and white and grey asteroid across the top.
We have impact.