Word: comets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...simply "did not want to talk about very large amounts of energy," says Canavan. "And therefore they wanted to ignore the problem." Some suggested heatedly, in leaks to the press, that pro-nuclear Star Wars scientists, frustrated by the down-sizing of their projects, were using the asteroid and comet threat as an excuse for revitalizing their jobs...
Once the nature of the approaching object is determined, explains physicist Edward Tagliaferri, a U.S. space program consultant, "it becomes easier to decide if you want a standoff explosion, a surface explosion or a subsurface explosion," If the asteroid or comet is small, it can be vaporized with a subsurface explosion, but for larger bodies, says Tagliaferri, "you'll probably have to nudge them into a new orbit." For an asteroid consisting largely of iron, he says, "you'd probably want to have a surface explosion...
...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...