Asteroid

Tonight, or more likely tomorrow night if skies clear, we might get a glimpse of what could be the year's best meteor shower. The Geminids can whip up 120 meteors per hour under dark skies. The crescent moon sets by 9 p.m. or so, making skies darker. Bright and medium-speed "shooting stars" will seem to spring from the constellation Gemini, rising in the east after dinner. They're dust from a battered asteroid, 3200 Phaethon, which flew by Monday.

Kids still rule.That's the lesson that most clearly emerged from Hollywood in 1998, and there's no doubt movie executives took it to heart. The throbbingly illogical "Armageddon" and similarly themed "Deep Impact," followed by the surprise comedy hits "There's Something About Mary" and "The Waterboy," double-teamed to win the day. (Can the action-comedy "Kick My Asteroid" -- with Cameron Diaz as a rocket scientist who gets into lewdly comic trouble with...

THE WORLD'S leading astronomers recently adopted a new rating system likely to have a Deep Impact on many people. Similar to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, it predicts the devastation likely to be wrought by a collision between Earth and an asteroid.Category 0 or 1: "You hit the snooze button and go back to sleep," said prominent astronomer Richard Binzel, who developed the 0-10 rating system for the International Astronomical Union.Category 10: "It will ruin your day." At a minimum.

Kids still rule.That's the lesson that most clearly emerged from Hollywood in 1998, and there's no doubt movie executives took it to heart. The throbbingly illogical ``Armageddon'' and similarly themed ``Deep Impact,'' followed by the surprise comedy hits ``There's Something About Mary'' and ``The Waterboy,'' double-teamed to win the day. (Can the action-comedy ``Kick My Asteroid'' -- with Cameron Diaz as a rocket scientist who gets into lewdly comic trouble...

WASHINGTON -- In the cosmic equivalent of a bullet whizzing by Earth's ear, a half-mile-wide asteroid looks as if it will come closer to smashing into our planet than any other space rock astronomers have tracked.It won't hit Earth. But its arrival in 28 years will be a visible reminder that space can be a dangerous place.After computing a new path for the dangerous rock, NASA scientists and other astronomers determined this week that the asteroid will come close -- but definitely not hit -- Earth on Aug. 7, 2027.

Controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab regained contact yesterday with the asteroid-bound NEAR spacecraft, more than a week after an unexplained computer glitch sent it into protective hibernation."

Contact with the Maryland-built NEAR spacecraft was lost late yesterday. The problem began shortly after the start of what was to have been a 20-minute rocket burn intended to speed NEAR toward a Jan. 10 rendezvous with the asteroid Eros."

Once every 40,000 years or so, to borrow Thomas Pynchon's phrase, a screaming comes across the sky.With a flash of light brighter than the sun, a jolt greater than any earthquake and a roar that might literally be heard around the world, an asteroid or comet larger than a quarter-mile in diameter slams into the fragile blue-and-green oasis we call Earth.Two new films about these killer collisions are due out this season -- "Deep Impact" tomorrow and "Armageddon" on July 1. As science fiction movies go, they are unusual.

THE END IS FAR! THE END IS FAR!Nothing really dramatic ever happens anymore. The universe is getting so boring. One day, an asteroid the size of a Rocky mountain is aiming for us in 2028. The next day, that prediction is retracted, and the astronomers who made it "could not be reached for comment."Another party ruined. But for a brief moment in time, chances were microscopic, infinitesimal, molecular and even small that Asteroid 1997 XF11 ("Biff," for short) would thump us to extinction. Despite the odds, Wednesday's thrilling astronomical bulletin rocked our puny imaginations.

WASHINGTON -- Just when you've got the house and yard the way you want them, along comes this astrophysicist from New Mexico who says an asteroid splashing down in the mid-Atlantic would wash it all away.The tidal wave triggered by such an impact "would probably wipe out Baltimore," said Jack Hills, of the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory.If the rock from space were big enough -- say, 3 miles wide -- the 300-foot wave, or tsunami, would also surge over Long Island, southern New Jersey, the entire Delmarva peninsula, southern coastal regions as far inland as the Appalachian foothills and all their coastal cities.

Warmongering adds to economic woes I appreciate that The Baltimore Sun has again placed the quagmire in Afghanistan on the front page, where it belongs ("Afghan bombings expected to worsen," April 5). As someone who has been protesting the invasion of that desperately poor country since 2001, I believe the war should always be on the front page, as misbegotten military adventures mean death and destruction for all sides. And to be frank, it is utter madness, especially as we face economic devastation, to expend billions of tax dollars funding wars and the occupation of the Palestinian people.

In the 1998 movie Armageddon, audiences thrilled as Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck scrambled to save life on Earth from destruction by an asteroid - and the vast majority left the theater safely confident that such a far-fetched threat could not possibly reflect reality. They should not have been so sure. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that on March 2, asteroid 2009 DD45 came within about 48,000 miles of Earth. In astronomical terms, that's way too close for comfort.

An asteroid hurtles toward Earth, threatening devastation. A team of attractive young scientists and engineers launches a rocket that crashes into the asteroid and knocks it off course - just in the nick of time. But wait. The crash pushes the giant space rock toward a "keyhole" in space: a tiny window that guarantees that the asteroid will come back and obliterate some hapless city in the future. What to do? A scruffy grad student raises his hand. How about a "gravity tractor" to tow it off course?

If you're reading this Tuesday morning (or any time thereafter), then scientists were right: An asteroid the size of a city block did not crash into the Earth as we slept. OK, there was never any danger of that. Asteroid 2007 TU24 swept by the planet at 3:33 a.m. EST at a safe distance of 334,000 miles - roughly one-and-a-half times the distance from Earth to the moon. But it was the closest an asteroid this size has come since 1985, and the closest one we know about until 2027. Had Earth been in the bulls-eye, TU24 would not have burned up harmlessly.

Tonight, or more likely tomorrow night if skies clear, we might get a glimpse of what could be the year's best meteor shower. The Geminids can whip up 120 meteors per hour under dark skies. The crescent moon sets by 9 p.m. or so, making skies darker. Bright and medium-speed "shooting stars" will seem to spring from the constellation Gemini, rising in the east after dinner. They're dust from a battered asteroid, 3200 Phaethon, which flew by Monday.

The asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is often credited with prompting the rise of the mammals we see today - including primates like us. But a new study says the effects of the dinosaurs' demise have been greatly exaggerated. Modern-day mammals, researchers say, displayed an initial burst of evolutionary diversity up to 100 million years ago - while the dinosaurs were still roaming prehistoric swamps. And the mammals showed a second burst between 55 million and 35 million years ago - long after the dinosaurs had disappeared.

NASA and the Air Force are studying ways to ward off a medium-sized asteroid that will streak within 18,000 miles of Earth in 2029 and has an extremely slight chance of crashing into our planet in 2036. Ideas discussed this week at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington include a "gravity tug" or "space tractor" that would hover near the space rock and tow it into a safe orbit. Other possibilities include a head-on collision with an unmanned spaceship or a nuclear explosion. In the past eight years, 754 asteroids bigger than 1 kilometer (about six-tenths of a mile, or 3,280 feet)

TV PICK-- Nova scienceNOW--Scientists investigate a "doomsday asteroid" that some say might hit the Earth in 2036. (MPT, Tuesday, 8 p.m.)

SAN JOSE, Calif. - A California Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that Apple Computer is entitled to subpoena the name and e-mail of the confidential source who leaked information about an unreleased product. The case has garnered national attention because it raises the issue of whether bloggers are journalists who are entitled to legal protections from disclosing the names of confidential sources. Superior Court Judge James P. Kleinberg, in San Jose, did not address what he described as the "complicated" question of who is a journalist.

A EUROPEAN study has rekindled debate about one of Earth's oldest mysteries: What was it that smashed into the planet 35 million years ago and created the largest impact crater in the United States - at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay? Scientists agree that some kind of meteor hit, leaving a submerged formation in the bay, roughly the size of Rhode Island. Another meteor hit in Popigai, Russia, about the same time, digging a crater about the same size. But there is little agreement about whether the meteors were asteroids or comets - or about the nature of the interstellar forces that sent the huge rocks hurling toward the planet.