Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SCIENCE: A fast-moving asteroid just misses earth...
...night of March 23? Out dancing, perhaps, or attending a PTA meeting or just sitting at home watching L.A. Law? If so, you did not realize how close you came to disaster. While you were blissfully unaware of the danger, a huge asteroid whizzed past the earth, coming closer than any other such heavenly body seen in 52 years. If the giant clump of rock -- half a mile across by one estimate -- had hit the planet, it would have packed the wallop of thousands of H-bombs and possibly killed millions of people. If it had come down...
Before you become alarmed, however, you should understand that this was a close encounter only in a relative sense. At its closest, the asteroid was about 450,000 miles away, roughly twice the distance between the earth and the moon. Still, in cosmic terms it was virtually a direct hit. No asteroid has been sighted so near since 1937, when Hermes, a minor planet nearly half a mile in diameter, passed by at about the same distance...
...asteroid, called 1989FC in accord with the official numbering system of the International Astronomical Union, was first detected by Henry Holt, an adjunct professor of geology at Northern Arizona University. That was in late March, after it was already moving safely away from earth. Holt spotted the speeding intruder in photographs taken through an 18-in. telescope at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California, during a systematic search for asteroids passing close by, which scientists call earth grazers. Holt figures that 1989FC may be in Hermes' league, but other astronomers dispute the claim, saying the new asteroid may be only...
Ominously, astronomers say 1989FC will be back. Like the earth, the asteroid orbits the sun, but it takes about 380 days to do so, instead of 365. When the asteroid passes by again next April, it will probably be at a safer distance from the earth. The next time earthlings need to worry, says astronomer Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, who calculated the orbit based on Holt's observations, is 2015. "If our figures are correct," he says, "the asteroid will have made 25 orbits to earth's 26, and we will meet again...