On a cloudy afternoon last January, the Air Force's powerful, computerized telescopes in New Mexico picked up a 100-foot-wide asteroid. At first it seemed like thousands of others orbiting the solar system, but quick analysis showed it was potentially on a collision course with the Earth and that this calamity might be only 36 hours away. Scientists calculated the collision had 40 percent chance of happening, most likely in the form of an explosion in the upper atmosphere with the force of a one-megaton bomb.
As scientists for NASA worked to keep track of the asteroid's position, heavy clouds moved over the primary telescopes in America and Europe, rendering them blind. They spent nine hours trying to spot it, but failed to get a clear picture of where the asteroid was headed. Finally, its location was pinpointed not by NASA's elite but by an amateur astronomer named Brian Warner.
Warner, 42, a computer programmer, was closing his backyard telescope down for the night when he received an e-mail from a senior scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., asking him to look at the patch of sky where asteroid 2004 AS1 would be if it was going to hit the Earth. To everyone's relief, it wasn't there. It eventually flew by the planet from the comforting distance of 8 million miles.
NASA and the Air Force had to rely upon an amateur astronomer to pinpoint the actual location of an asteroid they estimated was only 36 hours from potentially striking the planet.
This is FAR DIFFERENT than the current asteroid, which was identified, tracked, and observed for several years. And I never claimed that we had just "found it", but only that the potential existed for others like it to suddenly be discovered....
And one of these days, we're going to face "crunch time" and the planet is going to collect a fresh crater on its surface to accompany the countless ones that already exist.
Did you read about the crater they discovered in Antarctica that that believe may have been responsible for breaking up Gondwana hundreds of millions of years ago?
universetoday.com
Hawk |
