Word: miles
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...actual collision? With a mile-wide asteroid? It sounded like the stuff of science fiction and grade-B movies. But front-page stories and TV newscasts around the world soon made clear that the possibility of a direct hit and a global catastrophe well within the lifetime of most people on Earth today was all too real...
...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...
...what really worries astronomers is the devil they don't know. While they estimate that perhaps as many as 2,000 asteroids larger than a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) across either cross or come close to Earth's orbit, they have discovered and tracked fewer than 200 of them. "We simply don't know where the other objects are," says JPL astronomer Helin. "But the ones that have been discovered," she warns, "certainly suggest that we could someday face a surprise encounter with a large, unseen object." The significance of the kilometer size? An impact of anything that...
...knock incoming rocks off their fatal trajectories. Armageddon is about tough guys doing a tough job in space, while Deep Impact (inspired by the '50s films When Worlds Collide and On the Beach) emphasizes the human drama on Earth. This is Hollywood, remember: the real-life asteroid is a mile wide; in Armageddon it's the size of Texas. Says producer Jerry Bruckheimer: "We always do things bigger." And faster; you needn't wait till 2028 for these big bangs...