Word: spahr
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...falling, chances are pretty good that Dr. Timothy Spahr will be among the first to know...
...While Spahr dined, a German amateur astronomer visited the Minor Planet website, noted the new object, called 2004 AS1, and noticed further that its brightness was expected to increase an almost unbelievable 4,000% in the next day or so--an indication that it was approaching with blistering speed. Then he plotted the orbit Spahr had calculated and realized that the chunk of rock, estimated at the time to be about 100 ft. across, was on a direct collision course with Earth--specifically, somewhere in the northern hemisphere--and only days away. At that size, it would probably explode...
When the German amateur posted an alert on an asteroid watchers e-mail list, astronomers around the world went into high gear. "By the time I got home at around midnight," says Spahr, "there were five messages waiting on my answering machine." Over the next several hours, he and others raced to try to figure out whether Earth truly was in danger. "All of us were initially very skeptical," says Clark Chapman, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "We thought it was a mistake or bad data or someone playing a trick...
...when Steve Chesley, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, checked Spahr's calculations, he came up with a 1-in-4 probability of a strike. "It was a responsible analysis," says Chapman. "It wasn't mistaken in any obvious way." There was one hitch: the asteroid's projected trajectory was based on only four observations over a one-hour period, hardly enough to be definitive. It would take another look to nail down its path for sure...
...Brian Warner, an amateur astronomer from Colorado Springs, Colo., aimed a telescope at the keyhole and found it was empty. 2004 AS1 wasn't going to hit Earth after all, and probably never will--luckily, since it turns out to be more like 1,600 ft. across. Next time, Spahr won't be depending on a sharp-eyed amateur. "Within two days after the incident," he says, "we had software to check for future impacts automatically...