Word: cometted
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Hurtling through the atmosphere at nearly 70 km per sec. (150,000 m.p.h.), the giant comet struck with catastrophic force, punching a hole some 40 km (25 miles) deep through the earth's crust and into the mantle. The violence of the collision 65 million years ago completely vaporized the 8-km-wide (5 miles) comet and blasted out a tremendous crater. Huge rocks, hurled high into the + air, rained down for hundreds of kilometers. A great fireball rose above the atmosphere, carrying with it vast amounts of pulverized debris...
Some 130 terrestrial impact craters had been identified, but none of them near the age of 65 million years was large enough to qualify as the Crater. Yet if a comet or asteroid massive enough to cause the extinction had struck the earth, it would have left a crater hundreds of kilometers wide. Some traces would still exist, despite the intervening millenniums of erosion, sedimentation and tectonic-plate movement...
...comet," says Horner, with a deep...
Well, O.K., maybe not. Have a beer, sit down in the gray sandstone grit, but do not attempt to reopen the great debate over whether the dinosaurs were wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous period by a huge comet or a vast cloud of volcanic dust or any of 80-odd other proposed killers, all of which Horner spurns. He has a rubber stamp that says, WHO GIVES A S--- WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS? Horner cares about how they lived...
...space sailing race first surfaced in Arthur C. Clarke's 1963 story The Wind from the Sun, about a seven-craft regatta to the moon. And in the mid-1970s, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena actually designed a sophisticated sailship to rendezvous with Halley's comet, but a NASA budget squeeze killed the project...