Word: marsden
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...scares me," said Jack Hills, an astronomer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "It really does." He and the rest of the world had good reason to be worried. Astronomer Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics had just announced that a newly discovered asteroid a mile wide was headed for Earth and might pass as close as 30,000 miles in the year 2028. "The chance of an actual collision is small," Marsden reported, "but not entirely out of the question...
...electronic camera, he had recorded three sets of images, 30 min. apart, of a small sector of the night sky. The digitized images, fed into a computer programmed to look for objects moving against the background of fixed stars, revealed an asteroid that Scotti, in an E-mail to Marsden, described as standing out "like a sore thumb...
...Marsden promptly posted Scotti's data on the Harvard Center's Website, making them available to other astronomers. In early March, those data and newer observations by two Japanese amateur astronomers and a Texas scientist were fed into the Harvard Center's number-crunching orbit predictor, which spat out the 30,000-mile "miss distance" that led Marsden to make his dramatic announcement...
WASHINGTON: Brian Marsden, the man who issued the asteroid alert that set a million hearts beating faster Thursday, looks pretty foolish today. New information from NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests that the mile-wide rock of doom, known as 1997 XF11, will pass a comfortable 600,000 miles, or more than two moon orbits, from the earth -- not the tight and potentially catastrophic 30,000-mile squeeze that Marsden suggested. ?It?s all in a day?s work,? said JPL scientist Don Yeomans -- who also stopped just short of accusing Marsden and the International Astronomical Union of scaremongering...
...media maelstron, the ripple effect was astonishing. John Walvoord, chancellor of the Dallas Theological Seminary, said the asteroid ?may be a foreshadowing of the second coming of Christ.? Dr. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, advocated planting a nuclear device on its rocky surface. And -- surprise, surprise -- Marsden himself smiled meekly from the front page of Friday?s New York Times. Which could go a long way toward answering Don Yeomans? question...