I thought some of you might be interested in this... "NASA Releases Near-Earth Object Search Report NASA has released a technical report on potential future search efforts for near-Earth objects after a year of analysis by scientists working on this issue. This Science Definition Team was chartered to study what should be done to find near-Earth objects less than 1 kilometer in size."
Here's the link to this report: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/report.html This is a 166 page report written mostly using metric; in fact, the words "miles" or "feet" do not appear at all. You might not have ever seen so many m and km in a NASA report before! The main exception is that they use the non-SI unit AU quite a bit. Maybe you'd brand me a heretic, but I think this is a useful unit for discussing distances of objects in relation to Earth - it beats "so many million km from Earth." 1 AU is the distance from Earth to our sun (at a certain point in our elliptical orbit). David Shatto Los Angeles
