TO : ALL
Re : Look! Up in the sky!
Press-Telegram [http://www.ptconnect.com/]
Wednesday, February 19, 1997
EDITORIAL
Page B8
Asteroid mania
From Scripps Howard News Service
Chicken Little was right. The sky is falling, at the rate of about a ton an
hour of galactic rocks hitting our atmosphere.
But the little stuff doesn't interest us. The big stuff -- killer
asteroids from outer space -- does. Homicidal asteroids are the stuff of
made-for-TV movies, learned article in The New Yorker and endless newspaper
stories filled with such titillating comparative statistics as ''a crater
the size of Washington, D.C.,'' and waves the height of skyscrapers washing
over Manhattan.
Events have conspired to feed the asteroid mania. The comet Hale-Bopp,
at 25 miles in diameter more than enough to wipe out life on Earth, will sail
by us in March, although at a safe remove of 123 million miles. And
scientists have discovered what they say is conclusive proof, a smoking
crater, so to speak, that the impact of a massive asteroid 65 millions years
ago wiped out the dinosaurs and made room for what eventually would be us.
The explosions in the Gulf of Mexico, we are told in the gee-whiz
statistics, was more powerful than all of the nuclear weapons on Earth going
off at once. Giant waves washed over Florida, depositing evidence of the
impact in the Atlantic, where scientists found it just this year.
The odds of getting his by another asteroid of that size -- one in 65
million and growing -- strike us as pretty good. But we wouldn't want to be
wiped out because of carelessness and inattention, so it's reassuring that
near-Earth asteroid tracking is a growing field in astronomy.
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USA TODAY [http://www.usatoday.com/]
Wednesday, February 19, 1997
Page 12A
Look! Up in the sky!
Meteors are making a splash all over these days. Just Sunday, February 13,
1997, scientists announced they had found proof that the mass extinction of
dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by a gigantic meteor slamming into
the Yucatan Peninsula. The impact was large enough to ''perturb,'' as NASA
scientists are wont to say, the Earth's climate and freeze the beasts.
That news is one more revelation in our growing obsession with the
threat posed by rogue space objects. Less than three years ago, we watched
as comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter's surface. That in turn gave
immediacy to Defense Department data, released just months later, showing that
Earth is regularly bombarded by meteors that explode in midair with nuclear
force. One, in 1908 over Siberia, flattened trees for miles and produced
strange ''white nights'' over most of Europe.
Some events are more dudly than deadly. In this weeks' NBC miniseries
''Asteroid,'' [http://www.nbc.com/asteroid] the beauteous single-mom
scientist discovers an asteroid is plummeting toward the Corn Belt. She
notifies the handsome emergency chief, then takes him home to meet Dad.
Many disasters ensure, including (a) a hurricane and (b) the acting.
Overacting and overreacting: The series and the threat seem to suit
each other.
Of course, we've been hit before. And no doubt we will be hit again.
Alarmed scientists point out that tens of thousands of objects follow paths
that intersect Earth's orbit, not counting unknown ''long-period comets''
that may come bursting into view at any moment. Thousands of these objects
are at least one kilometer wide -- large enough to produce, according to the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, ''the end of civilization
and even the extinction of mankind.''
Moreover, fewer than 10 percent of close-approach object have been
identified, and the data we do have gives little comfort. Asteroid 4179
Toutatis will pass within a mere .0104 Astronomical Units (roughly, 969,000
miles) in 2004. No wonder we're fixated. What happens if 4179 Toutatis
develops a wobble?
Some think we can use atomic weapons to divert incoming objects -- a
handy rationale for the nuclear weapons industry. But really, no noes knows
what to do, and that's all right. Uncertainty gives the threat a perverse
value. It provides a creative outlet for near-Earth astronomers and
employment for actors willing to run around the set like dinosaurs with their
heads cut off.
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Till later, MAC??? / tNATOA / [PRo-iauR]