Word: earthed
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CREDIT FOR EARTH...
...honored to have been profiled by TIME in your special report on Earth Day [HEROES FOR THE PLANET, April 26]. Some readers, however, might be left with the impression that Earth Day was my idea. Former Senator Gaylord Nelson first proposed the event; he was the board's chairman, and he persuaded me to serve as national coordinator. Senator Nelson is thus the true "father" of Earth Day. I was, perhaps, its midwife. DENIS HAYES, CHAIR Earth Day Network Seattle...
Astronomers have good news, better news and some bad news about an asteroid known as 2007 WD5. The good news is that this 164-ft.-wide chunk of speeding space rock, discovered in November in an ongoing search for potential threats to Earth, won't hit our planet any time in the foreseeable future. The better news - for eager space-watchers - is that the asteroid, currently about halfway between Earth and Mars, has a plausible chance of hitting the Red Planet at the end of January. If it does, astronomers will be treated to an unprecedented sight...
...event itself, however, will have plenty of precedent. The craters that pock the surface of Mars, the Moon, Mercury and other Solar System bodies come from about four billion years' worth of this sort of thing. Earth has had plenty of collisions too; it's just that erosion, continental drift and vegetation have erased or hidden most of them. Not all, though: Meteor Crater, in Arizona, was blasted out some 50,000 years ago by an asteroid about the same size as 2007 WD5. A much bigger object, a few miles across, is thought by many scientists...
...does smack into Mars, every telescope on Earth will be pointed in that direction - just as they were in 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter. In that case, the comet broke up while it was still in orbit, so astronomers watched nearly two dozen individual impacts. But Jupiter is made mostly of thick clouds, so there was no lasting scar, and because it lies so far from Earth, the event wasn't quite as spectacular as this one promises to be. Asteroid 2007 WD5 should release some 3 megatons of energy if it slams into solid ground...