NASA’s spacecraft with an asteroid clobbering mission going where no spacecraft has gone before. While a distant killer asteroid heads to Earth, a high level of international collaboration is made for the planetary defense and NASA’s spacecraft takes the asteroid smashing mission to prevent potential asteroid collisions with Earth. As the spacecraft zeroes in on the target asteroid and finally puts it into pieces, cheers and congratulations ring out through the control room. Afterwards, instead of calculating the aftermath of the death meteor by scientists, there are many touching moments of family reunion and a beautiful wedding, because it’s not NASA’s recent Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, but in actuality, a movie titled Armageddon.

Armageddon was directed by Michael Bay and stars Bruce Willis as an unlikely hero saving Earth from a massive asteroid the size of Texas set to wipe all planet life. Not an astronaut, military official, or scientist, the protagonist is none other than Harry Stamper, a blue-collar deep-core driller who is tasked to drill a hole into the asteroid and detonate a nuclear bomb to split it in two. Meteorite collision has been classic material in science fiction movies. Between baby boomers’ classic, Star Trek and MZ generation’s black comedy hit Don’t Look Up, there is Armageddon, the critically and commercially acclaimed science fiction disaster film depicting humanity’s fictional first attempt to impact and alter the motion of an asteroid.   

Even though Armageddon was released in 1998, we can still feel the relevance of this genre of sci-fi today. International space organizations are now working together to help protect Earth, just like they did in the film when global satellites helped bring messages back to NASA’s control room from the characters. Countries around the world are helping to make NASA’s DART demonstration a more in-depth study of how to defend Earth such as a European Space Agency’s Hera mission and Italy’s LICIACube, which will be taking pictures of the aftermath of DART’s impact.

NASA’s DART mission collided the spacecraft with Dimorphos, the moonlet which orbited Didymos, the larger asteroid, of which neither were actually dangerous to our planet. In addition to this, the largest known potentially hazardous asteroid is only 7 kilometers. Despite the scientific inaccuracies, the setting of Armageddon makes way for an incredibly emotional storyline that has and will continue to touch the hearts of viewers of all ages.