Meteor is a 2009 American disaster television miniseries directed by Ernie Barbarash, written by Alex Greenfield and distributed by RHI Entertainment, in association with Alpine Medien Productions, Larry Levinson Productions and Grand Army Entertainment. Shot in the United States, the series stars Marla Sokoloff, Michael Rooker, Billy Campbell, Stacy Keach, Christopher Lloyd, Kenneth Mitchell, Ernie Hudson, Mimi Michaels and Jason Alexander. The story is about the asteroid 114 Kassandra, which is on a collision course with the Earth. Its surrounding meteorites crash into various locations worldwide, including the small town of Taft, California, while the military is having little success eliminating it.
The first part of the series was broadcast on the NBC network July 12, 2009 and the second part aired a week later on July 19, 2009.
Plot
Astronomer Dr. Lehman (Christopher Lloyd), and his assistant, Imogene O'Neill (Marla Sokoloff), race against time to provide vital information to JPL rocket scientist Dr. Chetwyn (Jason Alexander). Dr. Lehman worked for Chetwyn until Chetwyn fired him, and Lehman is the only one who is authorized to prevent the impending destruction. Lehman gets hit by a car and Imogene strives on alone, encountering various murderers and automotive failures. Amidst the chaos, Detective Jack Crowe (Billy Campbell) desperately searches for his psychotic ex-partner Stark (Michael Rooker) before the madman seeks his revenge against Jack by killing Jack's father and daughter. Meanwhile, Jack's father, the police sheriff (Stacy Keach) of the town of Taft, deals with subsiding the panic in his town as the meteor shower continues. Another subplot involves a family struggling for survival in a meteor-struck hospital.
After the United States launches numerous nuclear weapons at the approaching asteroid, Imogene discovers a flaw in Dr. Lehman's algorithm and finds that 114 Kassandra had been split in two by the comet that knocked it out of orbit. The second half of Kassandra is larger than the first, and the military's nuclear arsenal is already nearly depleted from destroying the first half, which was believed to be the whole meteor.
As the meteor draws closer to Earth, the meteor storms surrounding it cause increasing amounts of damage as they occur at an unstoppable pace. Part of the headquarters of the scientists tracking Kassandra is hit, resulting in Dr. Chetwyn's death.
Imogene finds herself as the only one left who can save the world from destruction, but she can no longer contact the government by any traditional means of communication. After being abducted by and escaping from Stark with Jack's help, she finds a radio tower that can be used to reach the remaining scientists at the base, but Stark unexpectedly returns, having survived being shot thanks to a bulletproof vest he had previously stolen, and he cuts the signal to lure Jack out. By the time that Stark is finally shot dead from a shotgun, by the Sheriff and Jack, and the signal is restored, Kassandra has entered Earth's atmosphere. The government decides to launch their remaining missiles in combination with the Russians and Chinese and accept the consequences - massive meteor storms that will still cause catastrophic damage. However, Imogene comes up with a new plan at the last minute, one which initially appears to have failed as Kassandra is not destroyed. It quickly becomes clear, however, that Imogene's plan instead deflected Kassandra harmlessly out of the Earth's atmosphere, saving the planet.
Three months later, Imogene joins Jack's family for dinner. Imogene warns Jack that there will be a "next time" in the year 2027 when an asteroid named AN-1999 passes within about 200,000 miles of Earth. If scientists calculations are one degree off or something knocks the asteroid off of its course, it could hit the Earth.
A meteorite is a rock that originated in outer space and has fallen to the surface of a planet or moon. When the original object enters the atmosphere, various factors such as friction, pressure, and chemical interactions with the atmospheric gases cause it to heat up and radiate energy. It then becomes a meteor and forms a fireball, also known as a shooting star; astronomers call the brightest examples "bolides". Once it settles on the larger body's surface, the meteor becomes a meteorite. Meteorites vary greatly in size. For geologists, a bolide is a meteorite large enough to create an impact crater.
A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body orbiting the Sun whose closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 times the Earth–Sun distance. This definition applies to the object's orbit around the Sun, rather than its current position, thus an object with such an orbit is considered an NEO even at times when it is far from making a close approach of Earth. If an NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's orbit, and the object is larger than 140 meters (460 ft) across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are asteroids, but about 0.35% are comets.
The Tunguska event was a large explosion of between 3 and 50 megatons that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate, Russia, on the morning of 30 June 1908. The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km2 (830 sq mi) of forest, and eyewitness accounts suggest up to three people may have died. The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst, the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres wide. The asteroid approached from the east-south-east, probably with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph). Though the incident is classified as an impact event, the object is thought to have exploded at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres rather than hitting the Earth's surface, leaving no impact crater.
Armageddon is a 1998 American science fiction disaster film produced and directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and released by Touchstone Pictures. The film follows a group of blue-collar deep-core drillers sent by NASA to stop a gigantic asteroid on a collision course with Earth. It stars an ensemble cast consisting of Bruce Willis with Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Will Patton, Peter Stormare, Keith David and Steve Buscemi.
An impact event is a collision between astronomical objects causing measurable effects. Impact events have been found to regularly occur in planetary systems, though the most frequent involve asteroids, comets or meteoroids and have minimal effect. When large objects impact terrestrial planets such as the Earth, there can be significant physical and biospheric consequences, as the impacting body is usually traveling at several kilometres a second, though atmospheres mitigate many surface impacts through atmospheric entry. Impact craters and structures are dominant landforms on many of the Solar System's solid objects and present the strongest empirical evidence for their frequency and scale.
The term Spaceguard loosely refers to a number of efforts to discover, catalogue, and study near-Earth objects (NEO), especially those that may impact Earth.
The B612 Foundation is a private nonprofit foundation headquartered in Mill Valley, California, United States, dedicated to planetary science and planetary defense against asteroids and other near-Earth object (NEO) impacts. It is led mainly by scientists, former astronauts and engineers from the Institute for Advanced Study, Southwest Research Institute, Stanford University, NASA and the space industry.
Without Warning is an American television film directed by Robert Iscove. It follows a duo of real-life reporters covering breaking news about three meteor fragments crashing into the Northern Hemisphere. It aired on CBS on October 30, 1994, and is presented as if it were an actual breaking news event, complete with remote reports from reporters. The executive producer was David L. Wolper, who produced a number of mockumentary-style films since the 1960s. The movie was heavily influenced by Orson Welles' 1938 The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, but just like said broadcast, Without Warning caused a nationwide panic.
Space Patrol is a British science-fiction television series featuring marionettes that was produced in 1962 and broadcast from the beginning of April 1963. It was written and produced by Roberta Leigh in association with ABC Weekend TV.
Meteor is a 1979 American science fiction disaster film directed by Ronald Neame and starring Sean Connery and Natalie Wood. The film's premise, which follows a group of scientists struggling with Cold War politics after an asteroid is detected to be on a collision course with Earth, was inspired by a 1967 MIT report, Project Icarus. The screenplay was written by Oscar winner Edmund H. North and Stanley Mann.
A.I.M. is a fictional criminal organization appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, it first appeared in Strange Tales #146. A.I.M. is primarily depicted as a think tank of brilliant scientists dedicated to world domination through technological means.
What the Butler Saw is a two-act farce written by the English playwright Joe Orton. He began work on the play in 1966 and completed it in July 1967, one month before his death. It opened at the Queen's Theatre in London on 5 March 1969. Orton's final play, it was the second to be performed after his death, following Funeral Games in 1968.
Banjawarn Station is a remote cattle station in Western Australia, that previously operated as a sheep station. In the 1990s Banjawarn was owned by the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, and following the Tokyo subway attack was the subject of an Australian Federal Police (AFP) investigation. Banjawarn is one of the 70 largest stations in Australia.
Claims of the existence of other moons of Earth—that is, of one or more natural satellites with relatively stable orbits of Earth, other than the Moon—have existed for some time. Several candidates have been proposed, but none have been confirmed. Since the 19th century, scientists have made genuine searches for more moons, but the possibility has also been the subject of a number of dubious non-scientific speculations as well as a number of likely hoaxes.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, sometimes called The New Alfred Hitchcock Presents, is an American television anthology series that orignally aired on NBC for one season from September 29, 1985 to May 4, 1986, and on the USA Network for three more seasons, from January 24, 1987, to July 22, 1989, with a total of four seasons consisting of 76 episodes. The series is an updated version of the 1955 eponymous series.
Scorcher is a 2002 science-fiction disaster film directed by James Seale and starring Mark Dacascos, John Rhys-Davies, Jeffrey Johnson, Tamara Davies, Mark Rolston, G.W. Bailey, Thomas F. Duffy, and Rutger Hauer. It was first released in the United States in 2002. It concerns a group of scientists who discover, after a disastrous nuclear accident, that the Earth's tectonic plates are shifting and creating immense pressure that will destroy the Earth in a fiery global eruption, and a few top scientists must find a way to stop it.
A meteor air burst is a type of air burst in which a meteoroid explodes after entering a planetary body's atmosphere. This fate leads them to be called fireballs or bolides, with the brightest air bursts known as superbolides. Such meteoroids were originally asteroids and comets of a few to several tens of meters in diameter. This separates them from the much smaller and far more common "shooting stars", that usually burn up quickly upon atmospheric entry.
"Dead No More: The Clone Conspiracy" is a 2016–17 Marvel Comics storyline starring Spider-Man. The story was notable for bringing long-dead Spider-Man supporting character Ben Reilly back to life. The storyline led Reilly to reclaim the heroic Scarlet Spider mantle and appear in his own comic book series. The story received generally mixed reviews, with critics praising the art style and action, however criticized the story and the retcons, as well as the treatment of Ben Reilly.
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