Word: asteroidal
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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...
...surprise, it turned out to be 30 times as rich in iridium as normal rocks. The Berkeley team knew of only a few places where such high concentrations of the rare element might occur: in the earth's core, perhaps 2,000 miles belowground; in extraterrestrial objects like asteroids (or their fragments, meteors) and comets; or in the cosmic dust drifting to earth from a nearby supernova (exploding star). The core material seemed too deep to come to the surface, and further analysis ruled out a supernova as the source, so father and son concluded that the iridium had been...
...Alvarezes did not stop there. Basing their calculations on the atmospheric consequences of the explosion of Krakatoa, they roughly estimated how much dust the impact of the asteroid would have thrown into the atmosphere, how long sunlight would have been blocked from the earth's surface, and what kinds of life would have been the most gravely affected by the climatic changes. They decided that plants, totally dependent on the sun for photosynthesis, and a variety of marine organisms would have died first, followed by the land animals highest on the food chain, the dinosaurs. Eventually the iridium-enriched debris...
...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...