Few of us are likely to be around to see Earth’s fiery destruction by a giant rock from outer space. Dr Amy Mainzer, however, has been at pains to make sure we get a good view of it.
In Don’t Look Up, Anchorman and The Big Short director Adam McKay’s entertaining and star-studded new film, astronomers Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a new comet is speeding towards Earth. With six months until impact and certain extinction, they desperately scramble to get the message out.
Dr Mainzer, astronomer and professor of planetary science at University of Arizona, and principal investigator of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Neowise) mission, served as scientific adviser on the film, and her involvement goes all the way back to McKay’s first ideas. “We had a lot of great conversations just about science denialism and the rejection of science in our society,” Dr Mainzer says. “And so it was immediately clear to me from talking to him that he really wanted to tackle this very fundamental and very serious problem that we have. That was a really big motivating factor for wanting to work with him.”
After that, Dr Mainzer acted as a sounding board for McKay, the cast and the production team in VFX, sound and costumes on all of the science. McKay, who also wrote the screenplay, was particularly involved. “I think Adam at this point is about halfway to his PhD in orbital dynamics. And Jennifer Lawrence, and certainly Leo DiCaprio – they learned a lot about it over the course of making the movie.”
It’s not all tsunamis, earthquakes and imminent extinction though. She hopes, too, that Don’t Look Up, which also stars Ariana Grande, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill and Mark Rylance, captures “just a small smidgen of the joy of science, of the fun parts of it; you know, the thrill of discovery, the excitement of getting to share something new that you learned with, with a bunch of your friends and your teammates. That’s really important to science.”
But just how accurate is the science in Don’t Look Up?
