Following the success of the mission to deflect the course of an asteroid in deep space, the NASA team headed by Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen has been awarded the David Lister Prize for Advanced Research into Selestial Engineering (the ARSE Prize).
The prize was announced at the Boston Pool Loft in Liverpool.
In his acceptance speech, Thomas Zurbuchen explained that while they had tried to plan it out using various computer based algorithms but were never confident that they had a succesful strategy.
“After placing a red ball on a green table to represent the asteroid Dimorphos, and a white ball to represent the DART vehicle we found that after a few lagers we were starting to squint at it at various angles and could envision hitting the white ball with a stick to knock the white ball into the red ball”.
After several more lagers they then had a karaoke evening.
The Dave Lister Prize
The ARSE prize is awarded in recognition of the ground breaking developments in astronomical engineering by the visionary Dave Lister.
The legendary guitarist and Indian food connoisseur devised the pool table interface to a mechanism to collide planets to plug a white hole.
While being a brilliant maverick, Dave Lister can’t spell very well and mis-spelt Selestial. No one felt they could correct his mistake. Some thought it might have been deliberate…
When they sobered up in the morning they measured the angle of the stick on the table and passed the information onto the launch team for the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.