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Shoemaker Levy​-​9

from Interplanetary Species by Mat Ward

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about

What would it be like if an asteroid hit Earth? Shoemaker Levy-9 gives us an idea.
As Carl Sagan puts it in his book "A Pale Blue Dot": "On March 25, 1993, a group of asteroid and comet hunters, looking at the photographic harvest from an intermittently cloudy night at Mount Palomar in California, discovered a faint elongated smudge on their films. It was near a very bright object in the sky, the planet Jupiter. Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy then asked other observers to take a look. The smudge turned out to be something astonishing: some 20 small, bright objects orbiting Jupiter, one behind the other, like pearls on a string. Collectively they are called Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (this is the ninth time that these collaborators have together discovered a periodic comet)...
"Between July 16 and 22, 1994, all the cometary fragments, one after another, collided with Jupiter. The biggest pieces seem to have been a few kilometers across. Their impacts with Jupiter were spectacular...
"Slamming into Jupiter at 60 kilometres a second (130,000 miles an hour), the large fragments converted their kinetic energy partly into shock waves, partly into heat. The temperature in the fireball was estimated at thousands of degrees. Some of the fireballs and plumes were far brighter than all the rest of Jupiter put together.
"There are about 200 known asteroids whose paths take them near the Earth. They are called, appropriately enough, 'near-Earth' asteroids... About 20 percent of them, sooner or later, are bound to hit the Earth — with devastating consequences."
I listened to this excerpt of "A Pale Blue Dot" as an audio book while cycling slowly through Sydney's eastern suburbs in 40C heat. When I got home, with that vivid image of the comet burned into my mind's eye, I chopped up a drum break by an artist called Breakage, added pitched snares and wrote this song:

lyrics

See your fate
Meet your maker
Shoemaker Levy-9

See your fate
Meet your maker
Shoemaker Levy-9

See your fate
Meet your maker
Shoemaker Levy-9

See your fate
Meet your maker
Shoemaker Levy-9

See your fate
Meet your maker
Shoemaker Levy-9

So you want to see your fate?
So you want to meet your maker?
Meet Shoemaker Levy-9

So you want to see your fate?
So you want to meet your maker?
Meet Shoemaker Levy-9

credits

from Interplanetary Species, released January 29, 2021
Written, produced, arranged, mixed and mastered by Mat Ward.

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Mat Ward Australia

Mat Ward blends future bass, drum and bass, punk and politics to come up with a different sound. He has released albums about financial markets, Apple, Elon Musk, surveillance, the media, Mars, protest chants and the climate. He also writes books and a music column that has been shared by the likes of Ru Paul, Chuck D, Tom Morello and Al Jourgensen. ... more

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