Word: spahr
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When Timothy Spahr finally knocked off work on Jan. 13, after more than 10 hours on the job, he figured he was at last done for the night. Spahr's task as an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Mass., is to collect reports of asteroids that might one day pass near Earth. On that Tuesday, he had been processing observations from an automated telescope in New Mexico when he noticed a pinpoint of light that might fit the profile. He calculated the object's orbit and, as usual, posted the information on the Minor Planet...
What happened next guaranteed that Spahr's workday wasn't nearly over. It also triggered a debate among astronomers about how quickly the public should be informed about dangers from space--and how sure scientists need to be before issuing such warnings. Several times in the past, sky watchers have announced that a rogue asteroid might threaten Earth--triggering the usual banner headlines--only to retract the warning a few days later. But while saying "never mind" is embarrassing, it would be much worse to keep a real danger quiet. And that's why Spahr's drawn-out workday...
...University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, Timothy Spahr, 26, peered through a stereoscopic microscope, shook his head and looked again. In the combined image of two telescopic photos he had shot 30 minutes apart a few nights earlier, a bright dot with a small tail stood out starkly against the background of fixed stars. "I was extremely excited, heart pounding and all that stuff," says Spahr, a graduate student from the University of Florida who was surveying the skies for undiscovered asteroids. He immediately shot and developed a second set of photos, and was shocked to see that in just...
...feelings went from disbelief to excitement to downright fear," says Spahr's survey partner, Carl Hergenrother, 23, an Arizona undergraduate who verified the find with a 90-in. telescope atop nearby Kitt Peak. "It was scary, because there was the possibility that we were confirming the demise of some city somewhere, or some state or small country...
Well, not quite. Early last week, four days after Spahr spotted it, his celestial interloper whizzed by Earth, missing the planet by 280,000 miles--a hairbreadth in astronomical terms. Perhaps a third of a mile across, it was the largest object ever observed to pass that close to Earth...