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Now for the next scary space thing July 09,2005 There is a category of worries called Bad Stuff from Outer Space, currently being ably exploited by the sci-fi film "War of the Worlds" where the bad stuff is aliens. A few years earlier the movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" played to fears that an asteroid would one day hit Earth.As far as fears go, despite our best efforts we've never found aliens "Out There," but we have found loads and loads of asteroids, comets and meteorites. And while an impact with one large enough to do major damage is a statistically improbable fear, it's not totally unrealistic. Sixty-five million years ago a meteorite or something hit the Earth and - blooie! - all the dinosaurs were gone. Clearly we don't want that to happen again. Happily NASA has just taken a major step toward having that problem in hand. In a truly impressive feat, the space agency launched the Deep Impact spacecraft last Jan. 12 and sent it to intercept a city-sized comet called Tempel 1 83 million miles away. Deep Impact launched an "impactor" probe into the path of the comet and then stood back to record the results. The impactor, filming its target all the way, hit the comet, penetrated its surface and detonated in an altogether satisfying fashion, sending gas and debris soaring into space. Scientists now hope to study both the debris and the crater to unlock the secrets of comet anatomy. It may take an excess of imagination to ask: Didn't we, uh, sort of make an unprovoked attack on the comet? And an even further excess to ask: What if it, like, belongs to somebody? But let us return to the context of more pressing worries. In 1997, around the time of the national asteroid scare, a Science News article on the question of catastrophic versus more measured change on Earth concluded, "Then again, an Everest-size comet could scream down onto the planet at any moment and silence the debate forever. We can only look up into the sky and wonder." Thanks to NASA we may no longer be limited to watching and wondering. Then we can turn to more outlandish fears about Real Bad Stuff from Outer Space like what if something comes looking for the people who wrecked his comet? ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
