Word: asteroidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Life on Mars? NASA got you all excited about apparent signs of life found on a Martian asteroid. Now some scientists have begun to pooh-pooh the ?evidence...
Leon Jaroff was off base in criticizing President Clinton's veto of the Clementine II program that would target an asteroid with a space probe [VIEWPOINT, Oct. 27]. The veto had nothing to do with asteroid indifference and everything to do with the fundamental weaknesses of the program. Clementine II is a thinly disguised version of the discredited "Brilliant Pebbles" missile-defense program of the 1980s, which posed major technical and treaty-compliance problems. The Air Force in 1997 did not want in its budget this Son of Brilliant Pebbles, masquerading as an asteroid-research program. Vetoing Clementine...
That is why some scientists are so distressed by President Clinton's line-item veto last week of the $30 million that Congress had allocated for the Clementine II project next year. Clementine is a spacecraft that was to be launched in 1999 to approach an asteroid named Toutatis and send a camera-equipped rocket barreling toward it. The missile, after taking close-up pictures of Toutatis, would smash into its surface while Clementine recorded the impact flash and analyzed any ejected material. The goal was not only to test our ability to rendezvous with an asteroid but also...
Astronomers estimate that about 2,000 objects large enough to cause a global catastrophe are hurtling on paths that either intersect or come close to Earth's orbit. Yet only 200 or so of these have thus far been identified and tracked. Just last year, a previously unknown asteroid some 1,600 ft. across was spotted four days before it whipped by Earth, missing us by only 280,000 miles--a hairbreadth by astronomical standards. Had it struck Earth, scientists say, the explosion would have been in the 3,000-to-12,000-megaton range, roughly equivalent to the explosive...
DIED. CHARLES DRAKE, 72, maverick geologist who argued that volcanic eruptions, not the asteroid of a leading 1980s theory, killed off the dinosaurs; of a heart attack; in Norwich, Vt. Drake was an expert in lost worlds; he also led a 1960 expedition that discovered bacteria living 20 ft. beneath the ocean's bottom...