On October 18, NASA issued an explanation of the strange lights that moved across the midwest around sunset on October 13. This explanation, based on calculations by satellite tracker Alan Pickup, was that the phenomenon was caused by the re-entry of a Russian Proton rocket that had been used to send up elements of a satellite tracking system a few hours before.
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Early last Friday evening a spectacular array of lights crossed the midwestern sky over a five minute period. Their slow movement appeared to rule out meteors, and news media throughout the region were flooded with UFO reports.
Earlier on Friday a trio of Glonass satellites lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan aboard a single Russian Proton rocket. The successful launch added three new satellites to the Glonass array and, unintentionally, triggered the Friday night sky show over Texas. Glonass is the Russian global positioning system.
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Asteroid 1998 OX4 has been identified in a report by a British Near-Earth Object task force as possibly impacting the earth as early as 2014. This object, with a 200-meter diameter, would cause massive damage, depending on where it struck the earth. If it struck land, it would completely destroy an area the size of Delaware, and leave the atmosphere laden with so much debris that the climate would be affected for years. The possible effect of impact at sea would range from tidal waves to severe earth and atmospheric disruption, depending on where it hit.
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One of the three British scientists who originally discovered the ozone hole over the Antarctic has announced that similar damage will soon take place in the Arctic. The reason for this is not that ozone-depleting gasses are still increasing in the atmosphere. They are actually declining, due to worldwide efforts to limit emissions.
The problem is that greenhouse gasses are causing more heat to be trapped close to the earth, with the result that the upper atmosphere is cooling rapidly. The cooling of the ozone layer has the effect of slowing its recovery and intensifying the effect of ozone-depleting gasses that are still present.
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