Astronomer Amy Mainzer is no stranger to asteroid-hunting. Mainzer is a professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona and serves as the principal investigator for NEOWISE, a NASA mission that uses an infrared space telescope to scour the skies for space debris. She'll soon lead the project's successor, the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, a planetary defense project that aims to find and catalogue comets and asteroids that could pose a threat to our planet.
If Mainzer's work sounds strikingly similar to the premise for Don't Look Up, Netflix's new disaster-comedy flick about a pair of astronomers who struggle to warn mankind about a comet on a crash course with Earth, that's because it is. Director Adam McKay — known for screwball comedies like Anchorman and, more recently, sociopolitical satires like The Big Short and Vice — tapped Mainzer as the movie's science adviser a few years back. In that capacity, she played a major role in helping sculpt the film's dialogue and characters, including astronomer Randall Mindy, who is played with believably neurotic energy by Leonardo DiCaprio. Mainzer recently caught up with Discover about hunting for space rocks, chatting with Meryl Streep via iPad and the invaluable role that scientists can play in an increasingly science-phobic society.
Q: Your research focuses on understanding small bodies in our solar system, like asteroids, and the potential impact hazard they pose to Earth. What got you interested in that?
A: It’s funny, it’s not where I started out. But one of the great things about working on different kinds of telescopes is that you survey all kinds of different things. From an observer’s standpoint, asteroids and comets are a lot of fun because they’re constantly moving. That means there’s a lot of activity and action associated with chasing these objects around the sky. Then from a scientific standpoint, they have a lot to teach us about the formation of the solar system and how we got to be here. And, of course, we like to be able to answer questions about the impacts themselves.
