Asteroid (Page 12)

BP may have been careless or parsimonious, but they certainly didn’t want the huge oil link, and the terrible publicity (not to mention clean up costs) that have come along with it, to happen (or did they?). Every industry has near misses like this one. Sometimes they could have been prevented and sometimes, maybe not. Despite reports from the media, it’s often hard to figure out what’s REALLY going on.

Some of the biggest fears are near misses in nuclear meltdowns and plane crashes. In the June 12th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Carl Bialik quotes industrial engineer Scott Shappell as saying, “All you hear about are crashes, but it’s the near misses that are telling. If you only knew how many near misses there are in aviation, you would never fly again.”
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It’s happening again: A near-Earth asteroid named 2005 YU55, which is on the list of potentially dangerous asteroids, was observed with the Arecibo Telescope’s planetary radar on April 19, 2010 when it was about 1.5 million miles from the Earth, which is about 6 times the distance to the moon. Will there be an impact? Will someone help prevent this potential catastrophe?
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Not with the Earth, but with EACH OTHER – X marks the spot: Asteroid impacts have wreaked havoc on this planet in the distant past (as well as probably bringing life here in the first place), but now that we have modern space telescopes, we can see two asteroids colliding with EACH OTHER. Should this worry us?

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.
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Craters are being found in Australia based on Aboriginal Dreaming Stories, but the Aborigines have been in Australia for around 50,000 years, while the craters are millions of years old. Are the Aborigines actually a far older population, or are the craters younger (or is there another explanation for the discrepancy)?

An Australian astronomer found a huge, bowl-shaped crater by searching Google Earth. But he knew where to look by listening to an Australian Aborigine “Dreaming Story” about a star that had fallen into a waterhole.
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