asteroid defense :: essays research papers

The U.S. federal government is summoning the worlds top scientists to an urgent assemblage this summer to plan defenses against an attack that could wipe out an American city or disrupt the whole countrys infrastructure. No, its not global terrorism. The scientists will map ship canal to combat an asteroid attack, a cosmic sucker punch like the collision that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and flattened a Siberian forest in 1908. While the worlds attention is focused on the real threat of terrorism, the theoretical asteroid menace has been garnering a surprising amount of behind-the-scenes attention. Britains Royal Astronomical Society hosted an international meeting of experts on the asteroid impact threat in December. In January the worlds astronomers petitioned Australias government to fund a limited asteroid-detecting telescope. In February NASA announced the "Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids," which will be conducted in Washington in September. In March, NASA activated "Sentry," a new system to monitor near- creation objects (NEOs) and assess their threat to Earth. NEOs are small objectsasteroids and certain cometsthat orbit in the solar system relatively close to Earth and could one day collide with Earth. "Weve had a couple of close shaves during the past few months," says Brian G. Marsden, with the HarvardSmithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One asteroid caused public jitters when observed March 12. Named 2002 EM7, it came from the direction of the sunan astronomical blind spot where objects are hidden in the suns glare. Astronomers didnt detect 2002 EM7 until four days after it came within 288,000 miles (460,000 kilometers) of Earth, which they regarded as a close encounter. The moon is about 239,000 miles, or 385,000 kilometers, from the Earth. The asteroid was about 200 feet (60 meters) in diameterbig enough to fill two-thirds of a football game fieldand could have flattened a city, unleashing the energy of a five-megaton nuclear bomb. "I think Mother Nature has given us yet some other wake-up call," says Donald K.