Word: comets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...danger is a comet or asteroid strike on the Earth. Thousands of chunks of cosmic rock enter the atmosphere of our planet every year. The vast majority burn up in the atmosphere, creating spectacular display for young lovers on lazy summer nights...
...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...
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...
...some time scientists have been moving toward the view that the extinction of the dinosaurs occurred after a giant comet or meteor struck the earth, filling the air with dust that shut out the sunlight for months. Now the theory is looking even better: a crater off the coast of Yucatan, known to be the right age (65 million years old) but thought to be too small to have been made by such a cosmic collision, has been discovered to be 185 miles across, not 110 as previously believed. The heavenly object that carved it out was plenty big enough...
These meteors are known as Perseids because they appear to emanate from the constellation Perseus, just as the Leonids, cast-off material from another comet, appear to radiate from a point in Leo. While most of the cometary debris consists of small particles, each tiny piece traveling at such high speed packs a mighty wallop capable of inflicting severe damage on anything it encounters. Consequently, satellites orbiting above the protective atmosphere during a heavy meteor shower are vulnerable. With this danger in mind, NASA prudently postponed last week's scheduled launch of the shuttle Discovery, which otherwise would have been...