Tumbling Stone

Tumbling Stone Revival: Keep the Stones Tumbling!

Livia Giacomini

INAF – National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy

“Asteroids, just as humans, are not all the same. Some of them are very stable, and live their lives without ever straying from their initial paths. Others can be somewhat unpredictable in their choices. And sometimes they can become dangerous.”

This is the incipit of one of the first articles I ever wrote. It was year 2001 and I was assistant editor of Tumbling Stone, the online monthly magazine co-sponsored by The Spaceguard Foundation and the NEODyS service. As the name suggested, this independent media was founded to inform about NEOs. We can say that it was one of the first attempts to deal at the same time with the science of this topic and with its mediatic impacts.

The words of Andrea Carusi, President of the SGF, explained very clearly our intent: “Tumbling Stone is addressed to everybody, although our main targets are journalists willing to understand more, to follow our activity, and to provide the public with reliable, updated and controlled information. We consider this as an important aspect of the international efforts that are being devoted to NEO studies and will do our best to provide enough basic information to follow the current research and their probable future developments.”

At the beginning of the century, NEO science was indeed developing quite fast. Many things in those years needed to be explained and discussed within the community, but also outside it. Tumbling Stone was like a science communication lab, a place where scientists and media professionals started to collaborate to find a good balance between science and newsworthiness, to find the right language to communicate impacts and more in general science. Tumbling Stone did its best to tell in real time the story of space exploration: starting from NEAR landing on asteroid EROS in 2001 up to Stardust flying through the dust atmosphere of comet Wild 2 in 2004. We also had the honour to witness the birth of future space missions, following the transformation of simple ideas into projects that today involve teams of hundreds of people and produce very important scientific and technological results.

Of course, it was not only about science. Politics, economy, war, and many other topics were raised in our monthly pages. Just like the rest of the world, in 2001 we were struck by the news and we witnessed and participated in the lively discussion that assigned the names Compassion, Solidarity and Magnanimity to three newly discovered asteroids in memory of the victims of the Twin Tower Attack.

Risk perception was another topic that the scientific community and the media discussed monthly in Tumbling Stone. Long before films like “Don’t Look Up!”, I remember events like the deorbiting of the Mir Space Station, when we needed to fight in first person the perception of uncontrolled risk caused by science. At least once a year, we had to publish a “Special Issue” with the scientific story of a first page, ready-to-hit, dangerous rock from space. We had to explain to the media and the general public that – No, we wouldn’t be hit in the next months/years by these bodies and that -Yes, we needed to monitor and study them.

We also had the chance to participate in the first political steps in this field of science, like the birth and growth of worldwide collaborations and campaigns to observe and monitor potentially dangerous bodies.

There were also political events, like the Congress in which the Palermo scale was introduced to quantify risk related to impacts more effectively. Another was the Workshop dedicated to arise NEOs interest in society organised by OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) in Italy in 2003.

To make all this come true, Tumbling Stone needed a special editorial staff. Besides myself, the “journalistic soul” behind the project included our editor in chief Nanni Riccobono, an Italian journalist coming from main stream media, fascinated by asteroids and their risk of impact. There was also a team of forward-thinking scientists, who were not ashamed to speak to the public in terms that were meant to be simple, engaging, innovative and sometimes funny. Like Andrea Carusi, Giovanni Valsecchi, of course Andrea Milani, and a young Ettore Perozzi with his very funny Tumbling Laughs. Then, we worked with a number of national and international scientists who were the real strength of the magazine.

Today, Tumbling Stone can no longer be found online and this is a pity. However, as you can clearly see, the community that was born within it and that grew with it, is more active than ever. All those efforts were not useless and I was very happy to learn that NEOROCKS is republishing some of the original content of those years, making it come alive with new facts, new discoveries, new discussion, new science. In a nutshell, the stories of NEOs can keep on rocking – or maybe we should say, tumbling -, right in these pages!