Word: asteroidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Slight is an understatement. The probability of the Earth colliding with an asteroid is beyond minuscule. Nevertheless, everyone seems to have space-borne disasters on the brain...
Certainly nobody is to be blamed for having neuroses or for writing stories about fictional extraterrestrial beings. But fantasy and reality are not the same, and when it comes time to solve our planet's most pressing problems, we must push fiction aside. It's possible that an asteroid will collide with the earth in five thousand years, but if we are not careful, it will not collide with a living, breathing planet, but rather with a radioactive piece of dead rock or a fatally poisoned ecosystem. It's not destruction from above that we must worry; it's about...
...proposal and some possible evidence of such double whammies on other planets and moons intrigued scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Using a supercomputer, a Sandia team, headed by physicist Mark Boslough has been simulating impact effects, seeking to determine the size and velocity of an asteroid necessary to generate enough heat to cause volcanic outpourings at the antipode...
Boslough describes himself as "totally agnostic" on the existence of antipodal volcanism. J.P.L.'s Kevin Baines, however, isn't neutral when it comes to the NASA team's sulfuric acid theory. "If the asteroid had struck almost any other place on earth, it wouldn't have generated this tremendous amount of sulfur." he says. "Dinosaurs would still be roaming the earth...
...from craft exploring Venus and Mars, for example, have helped make us aware of the consequences of such potential man-made disasters as the greenhouse effect and the destruction of the ozone layer. Perhaps even more important, spacecraft may one day prevent a global catastrophe by diverting a large asteroid speeding toward a collision with Earth...