![]() Both desperately try to swerve, but the truck's trailer lags behind in the swerve and Dr. Wolf and the truck driver finally look up, alerted to the shine of each others' headlights, and see they're about to collide. The pain causes him to involuntarily look down while he bats at his lap and the ash from his cigarette. ![]() Wolf, pre-occupied with trying to finish placing his call and reaching a live person, focuses more on his phone than on the road, the driver's cigarette slips from his mouth, hitting his lap. The driver, smoking a cigarette and listening to country music, is badly sleep-deprived drinking a high-sugar soft drink to keep himself awake. Meanwhile, an 18-wheel big-rig truck is coming down the road. Cell phone technology of the year (1998) being crude and limited, it takes him several long, harrowing minutes just to reach the automated answering system. As he races down the road, he struggles desperately to place a call on his cell phone to the Department of Planetary Sciences. He writes his own surname and Leo's surname (Wolf-Beiderman) on the floppy drive and rushes out of the observatory to his jeep. Wolf grabs the floppy and stuffs it, along with the packet received from Leo, into a padded manila envelops. Exasperated and in a desperate hurry, Dr. After over a minute, however, he only gets two responses that the server is down. Seizing a floppy disk, Wolf saves all the data to it while instructing his computer to open a UNIX mail server to send the information out in email. An orbital interpolation graphic on his monitor overlays the comet's projected path on a small display of the solar system- and a large dot quickly appears on the third elliptical line around the sun's icon the comet is projected to strike Earth. ![]() ![]() Wolf's curious expression fades into a look of severe worry and concern. As the numbers begin to scroll through the screen, Dr. Curious about it, he directs his computer to analyze the comet's position and calculate its trajectory. His observatory's telescopes zooming in on it, he sees it is in fact a comet. Punching the stellar coordinates into his computer, he sees it is an uncharted object. Seating himself at his work station, he finds the packet sent him by Leo, containing a photograph of the unknown star near Mizar and Alcor, and a cover letter asking him to identify it. Marcus Wolf (Charles Martin Smith, uncredited) arrives for work at the Adrian Peak observatory in Tuscon, Arizona. As Perry walks away, Leo and Sarah get into a brief, teasing argument about whether the unidentified star is Megrez. Wolf, a professional astronomer who sponsors the Lee High School Astronomy club. Perry, thinking it might be a satellite, suggests they take a photograph and send it to Dr. Leo correctly identifies the stars Mizar and Alcor, but cannot name a somewhat smaller, dimmer star a bit south of the other two, although he is sure that it is not the star Megrez, as Sarah claims. Perry (Mike O'Malley) comes up and quizzes them about some of the brighter stars. As they look through their telescopes at the stars, Leo innocently asks Sarah about another male student who invited her to a student party. Two students at this club are Leo Beiderman (Elijah Wood) and his girlfriend, Sarah Hotchner (Leelee Sobieski). Among these are students and faculty of the Lee High School Astronomy Club. The camera slowly pans down where stargazers and amateur astronomers are gathered with telescopes. Impact opens to a starry night sky in Richmond, Virginia. And the crew who's going to stop the comet makes their farewells to their families. In the meantime the young man who found the comet is being hailed as a hero. The President assures them that they have thought it out carefully. The reporter then asks the President if the reason why his Cabinet member resigned is because he doesn't believe the plan will work. And he announces that for sometime the government along with a few others have been building a vessel that will sent to intercept the comet. And eventually that it's course will take it to earth but the problem is that the comet is so big that if it strikes it will cause what is known as an Extinction Level Event which will wipe out all life on the planet. Later at a Press Conference, the President announces that a year ago that two astronomers discovered something a comet. She convinces him to call a Press Conference so that he can tell everyone what's going on. Later she's brought before the President who asks her to keep what she knows under wraps for now. A year later a reporter who's investigating why a member of the President's cabinet resigns when she goes to speak to him he says he wants to be with his family. So they take a picture of it and send it to their adviser who, upon seeing it, jumps into his car and crashes. A young man who's part of his school's astronomy club sees something in the sky that is not known.
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