Word: cometed
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...project is named for the year when Halley's Comet will next be visible...
...attacking a large comet or stony asteroid, however, the interceptors would have to take care not to blast their quarry into many large chunks, each of which would be a potential city killer. One way of avoiding that, workshop scientists suggested, is to use the neutron bomb, a weapon that delivers most of its energy in the form of speeding neutrons rather than an explosive blast. The neutron warhead would be detonated when the missile approached to about a distance equal to the radius of the asteroid. "The neutrons penetrate deeply into the near side of the asteroid," Canavan explains...
Antinuclear, anti-Star Wars scientists were not reassured. Some campaigned through last summer against even the mention of any nuclear deterrence in the final draft of the interception workshop's report. Then came word of Comet Swift-Tuttle. "Nothing so clears the mind as the sight of the gallows," quips Canavan, who oversaw the final report. "Even though Swift-Tuttle turned out to be a false alarm," he says, "it brought everyone's thinking into focus. There was no longer the kind of disagreement you saw earlier about nukes versus non-nukes." Compromises were made, and the long-delayed interception...
...observatory darkroom, he turns the negatives over to Carolyn, who scans each set of two under her stereo microscope. If anything has moved against the background of fixed stars during the 40-min. interval, it appears to float in the eyepiece. If so, it is an asteroid or comet and might someday present a threat...
...billion-year-old Sudbury Crater, which is 300 km (188 miles) wide. From there, they flew to Iowa City, Iowa, where Gene examined core samples from the nearby Manson Crater, 35 km (22 miles) across and about 65 million years old and perhaps made by a chunk of the comet that killed the dinosaurs. Then, after a weekend back in Flagstaff, the Shoemakers departed for their annual one-month field trip in the Australian Outback, where the ancient and stable land surface, peppered with craters of all ages, is a happy hunting ground for geologists...