So despite all efforts four of seven deflection options failed. The asteroid was broken into two pieces and one - about 100 m big - was still heading toward earth. India's disruption mission, that I had sent, failed too. And the destruction machine was headed toward the Indian subcontinent. It was only about a month ahead of time that we found out that the darned thing would hit Dhaka Bangladesh squarely, and so now it was all about emergency planning and disaster mitigation. The astronomer's work was done.

My big lesson from this exercise was that perhaps we should have let the asteroid fall where it wanted to - Pacific Ocean. But we mucked with it, and now we are going to cause a lot more destruction.