Word: asteroids
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...June 19, 1968 the asteroid Icarus, which is nearly a mile in diameter, will crash into the mid-Atlantic, 2,000 miles east of Florida. Its impact - the equivalent of a 500,000-megaton bomb blast - will splash out some 1,000 cubic miles of sea water and form a crater 15 miles across in the ocean floor. Tidal waves 100 ft. high will sweep across coastal cities on both sides of the ocean, and earthquakes 100 times worse than any ever recorded will be felt all over the world. Clearly, Icarus must be stopped. No expense will be spared...
After 15 weeks of frantic planning, Sandorff's 21 senior and graduate engineering students worked out a complex scheme that they-and their instructor -believe would save the world from collision with an onrushing asteroid...
Collision Course. Icarus itself is quite real. Unlike most asteroids, which circle the sun in planetlike orbits between Mars and Jupiter, Icarus has a highly elliptical orbit. Like its mythological namesake, it swoops closer to the sun (only 17 million miles away) than any other planetary body of the solar system, and recedes as far away as 183 million miles, beyond the orbit of Mars. In its journey, it moves close to the earth's orbital path every 13 months and narrowly-by astronomical standards-misses the earth once every 19 years. Astronomers have charted its current orbit precisely...
...Away. To save the earth, they decided, it would be necessary to launch a salvo of hydrogen bombs into the asteroid's path. To loft the warheads, the U.S. could rush to completion five Saturn 5 Apollo rockets now under construction and build four more from scratch. A second Saturn launch pad now under construction at Cape Kennedy should be completed, and a third could be built. The Atomic Energy Commission would be requested to assemble six 100-megaton H-bomb warheads, the minimum size necessary to attack Icarus effectively...
...University of Chicago and James R. Arnold of the University of California, San Diego. If that were so, the two men argue in the latest issue of Science, Mars would show many more craters than it appears to have. Assuming a fairly constant supply of crater-forming asteroids, Mars, which is far closer to the asteroid belt, would have been hit up to 25 times more often than the moon. There would be as many as 220 craters per 1,000,000 sq. km., not the meager 37 that have been observed...