Collision Earth (2011)
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(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2014
SYNOPSIS: The first mission to Mercury is just about to go into orbit around the planet, when a freak solar event causes the sun to temporarily turn into a magnetar, unleashing a massive solar magnetic storm. This blows. On several levels. It blows chunks -- out of Mercury, creating a dangerous debris field, which the spaceship will have to navigate around. It blows -- up the ship's main control panel, killing the co-pilot instantly. The captain receives a lethal dose of radiation, which will kill him at a suitably dramatic moment later. The flight engineer, sitting a full six feet away, is completely unharmed. It blows -- Mercury out of orbit. And it blows -- out most of the Earth's electrical grid, except for the parts necessary for the plot.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the flight engineer's husband learns about the solar event on CNN, thanks to his TV being one of the plot-specific electronic devices still working. He pulls out his telescope and finds that Mercury is no longer where it should be. Fortunately, he just happens to be an astronomer who used to work on a top-secret asteroid defense project. Unfortunately, the project came up with two alternative defense mechanisms -- missiles and some sort of magnetic pusher thing called Project 7 which is never really adequately explained -- and the one he championed, Project 7, lost out and he got canned. But he still has some friends at the base who reassure him that, yes, Mercury is headed in Earth's general direction, but it will miss by a large margin.
This doesn't mean it's having no effect, though. There are freak meteor showers as rocks that were blown off Mercury rain down on the planet. And the storm's residual magnetic effects occasionally cause cars to go flying randomly into the air.
Back in Mercury orbit, the flight engineer finally manages to get her ship's radio working well enough to send a faint transmission to Earth. Unfortunately, since the magnetic storm has taken all conventional tracking stations offline, the only people who can pick it up are a pair of college students who are running a pirate radio station. Since they're in the Pacific Northwest and all the phones are out, they have no way to get a message to NASA. But they are conveniently close to the flight engineer's husband, who can maybe use his old space contacts to get a message to the proper authorities.
Meanwhile, the husband has analyzed the meteorites and realizes that they're highly magnetized. Which means, instead of a near miss of Earth, Mercury is going to lock onto the Earth's magnetic field and crash into the planet, smashing it to bits. The asteroid defense team has figured this out, too, but their missiles are no match for something the size of a planet and so heavily magnetized. Only Project 7 stands a chance. But Project 7 is on a nearby asteroid and was never finished. If only they knew someone in a spaceship hurtling toward Earth at a zillion miles an hour...
Greg Pearson
