Word: cometted
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...DOOMSDAY PREDICTION] The Heaven's Gate cult claims the earth will be destroyed, and they must flee on a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp...
...about half the estimated 500 to 1,000 near-Earth asteroids six-tenths of a mile across or larger--big enough to cause a global catastrophe--had been detected. One of the unknowns could even now be on a collision course with Earth. The sudden appearance of long-period comets, usually larger and with better than twice the impact velocity of asteroids, presents an even greater menace. Such objects (comet Hale-Bopp was one) are usually not spotted until they begin to flare somewhere out near the orbit of Jupiter or closer, only a few to 18 months before they...
...geological scale, of course--it was only 49,000 years ago that an iron asteroid blasted out Arizona's three-quarter-mile-wide Meteor Crater, almost certainly killing any living creatures for hundreds of miles around. As recently as 1908, a small rocky asteroid or chunk of a comet exploded five miles above the Tunguska region of Siberia, felling trees, starting fires and killing wildlife over an area of more than 1,000 sq. mi. Had the blast, now estimated at tens of megatons, occurred over New York City or London, hundreds of thousands would have died...
What to do if an Earth-bound comet or asteroid is discovered? Early detection, preferably many years in advance, would enable us to send out exploratory spacecraft to determine the nature of the interloper, much like the spacecraft near's current investigation of the asteroid Eros. Scientists at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories are already dreaming up a variety of ingenious defenses against an incoming asteroid. Depending on its mass and composition, they would use tailor-made nuclear explosions to pulverize a small asteroid or deflect a larger one. Given enough time, and under the proper circumstances...
...fewer people answering questions than the other sites, but I got a Dr. Odenwald, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard, to ease my fears about asteroids just hours after I had started fretting about them. Then again, he also told me that a rogue comet could cause "global catastrophe." Like I needed to know that...