Tag: asteroids

The Tunguska centennial

Canada Day and U.S. Independence Day fireworks this week in honour of the countries’ 111th 141st* and 232nd birthdays, respectively, can’t hold a Roman candle to the natural fireworks that erupted in western Siberia exactly 100 years ago. On June 30, 1908, at around 7:17 a.m. local time, natives and settlers near the Podkammennaya Tunguska …

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The Tunguska centennial

Canada Day and U.S. Independence Day fireworks this week in honour of the countries’ 111th 141st* and 232nd birthdays, respectively, can’t hold a Roman candle to the natural fireworks that erupted in western Siberia exactly 100 years ago. On June 30, 1908, at around 7:17 a.m. local time, natives and settlers near the Podkammennaya Tunguska …

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Watch for falling rock

Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. As a kid I was always disappointed when we drove past “Watch for Falling Rock” signs in the mountains and no rocks actually fell. (I had a similar reaction to deerless “Deer Crossing” signs.) Obviously we were just driving in the wrong places, because …

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Baptistina family fingered in mass killing

Sounds like a lurid headline from a New York tabloid, doesn’t it? Except in this case the “Baptistina family”refers to asteroids, and the victims were the dinosaurs.

A manned mission to an asteroid?

It’s being seriously considered. There’s interest in asteroids for a range of reasons…for exploration, for pure science, resource utilization, as well as learning how to mitigate the threat from a sniping space rock that has its crosshairs on Earth. Neither Bruce Willis nor Clint Eastwood, I hasten to add, will be involved in any putative …

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Asteroids, again

On March 8 an asteroid between 40 and 80 meters in diameter passed with 480,200 kilometres of Earth. No one saw it until four days later. In 1908, something about the same size blasted into the atmosphere above the Tungaska forest in Siberia in 1908 and exploded with force of 15 million tons of TNT, …

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The Saga of NEAR

Monday, a plucky little spacecraft called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous,” is going to attempt to make space exploration history. Back in February of 1996, the 805-kilogram spacecraft, a short, stubby cylinder with four solar panels forming a cross shape at one end, was launched to rendezvous and orbit the asteroid Eros, whose orbit …

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Asteroids

Most of the time, they’re harmless. Innocuous, really. They tumble along, minding their own business, not hurting anybody. But every once in a while–BOOM! “They” are asteroids, and when they go boom, it’s because they’ve run into something. When that something is Earth…well, you’ve got trouble with a capital T, and that rhymes with E, …

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Lucifer’s Hammer: the asteroid threat

Haven’t had anything to worry about for a while? Here, let me fix that… Sometime around the end of the ’70s I read a book called Lucifer’s Hammer, by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. It was a good book (a bestseller, in fact), but out of all its memorable scenes the one I remember best is …

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