Word: asteroid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some 400 miles to the southeast, atop snow-covered Mount Palomar, Eugene Shoemaker, a geologist on leave from the U.S. Geological Survey, and his wife Carolyn, an asteroid astronomer, scurry around the unheated dome of the 18- in. Schmidt telescope. They photograph the sky in four-minute exposures, hunting for fast-moving objects against the background of the fixed stars. So far their Palomar study has identified 25 asteroids that cross the earth's orbit, bringing the known total to 60. Asteroids like this, they think, have occasionally crashed into the earth with catastrophic consequences, and they strive to calculate...
...modern diplomacy in a naive and simplistic manner. The problems of the world aren't going to be solved by the cooperation of U.S. U.S.S.R. space teams, nor by the discovery of new life in the Universe. Men will be men, no matter how many monoliths litter the asteroid belt...
...effects. The flying dragon and huge stone eater make the Star Wars aliens look like extras in a latenight Japanese horror movie. Unfortunately, these outstanding visual effects mostly appear in the first 20 minutes. After that, the audience sees a lot of deserted beaches, a crumbling temple and an asteroid belt...
Nearer to earth, IRAS identified at least five new comets and spotted a "miniplanet" only 1.2 miles in diameter, possibly the cadaver of a comet, circling within the orbit of the innermost planet, Mercury. IRAS also uncovered some bands of fine dust spread over 100 million miles in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The dust may be the debris of collisions between asteroids...
...mysterious extinction: radiation from an exploding star, a reversal of the earth's magnetic field, a global epidemic, even the destruction of eggs by small mammals. Colbert, skeptical of all the theories, is especially critical of the latest and most popular explanation: the earth, struck by a giant asteroid, kicked up a huge volume of dust, reducing sunlight and killing off the plants that dinosaurs ate. Colbert points out that new finds in Montana show that the animals were dying well before the asteroid hit. Says he: "We probably shall never know why these fabulous reptiles, so long...