Word: asteroidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...scares me," said Jack Hills, an astronomer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It really does." He and the rest of the world had good reason to be worried. Astronomer Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had just announced that a newly discovered asteroid a mile wide was headed for Earth and might pass as close as 30,000 miles in the year 2028. "The chance of an actual collision is small," Marsden reported, "but not entirely out of the question...
...actual collision? With a mile-wide asteroid? It sounded like the stuff of science fiction and grade-B movies. But front-page stories and TV newscasts around the world soon made clear that the possibility of a direct hit and a global catastrophe well within the lifetime of most people on Earth today was all too real...
WASHINGTON: Brian Marsden, the man who issued the asteroid alert that set a million hearts beating faster Thursday, looks pretty foolish today. New information from NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests that the mile-wide rock of doom, known as 1997 XF11, will pass a comfortable 600,000 miles, or more than two moon orbits, from the earth -- not the tight and potentially catastrophic 30,000-mile squeeze that Marsden suggested. ?It?s all in a day?s work,? said JPL scientist Don Yeomans -- who also stopped just short of accusing Marsden and the International Astronomical Union of scaremongering...
...indeed. Just one day after the asteroid slammed into the media maelstron, the ripple effect was astonishing. John Walvoord, chancellor of the Dallas Theological Seminary, said the asteroid ?may be a foreshadowing of the second coming of Christ.? Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, advocated planting a nuclear device on its rocky surface. And -- surprise, surprise -- Marsden himself smiled meekly from the front page of Friday?s New York Times. Which could go a long way toward answering Don Yeomans? question...
...there's no cause for alarm -- at least, not until 2002, when the rock will be close enough for radar to detect its exact course. That leaves three decades for scientists to decide whether or not to nuke the thing -- and for Hollywood to produce a plethora of asteroid Armageddon flicks...