Word: asteroidal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Brian G. Marsden, associate director for planetary sciences at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, rates the chance of a Tunguska-sized asteroid hitting the Earth during the next 100 years as "excellent," and gives smaller but significant odds to an even larger asteroid strike...
Measuring only 60 meters across, the Tunguska asteroid pales in size compared to the one kilometer asteroids which could cause a global climate change, or the 10 kilometer mass to which most scientists attribute the extinction of the dinosaurs...
...worry about earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters because they frequently affect populated areas. But we underestimate the danger of asteroid and comet strikes because they often occur in the ocean...
According to the numbers, each of us has a lifetime risk of one in 30,000 of death by asteroid--roughly equivalent to our chances of dying in a plane crash...
Marsden says that if we didn't specifically search for it, we probably wouldn't detect an incoming asteroid or comet until radar picked it up at the range of the moon...