What To Do Before the Asteroid Strikes
by Andrew Lawler
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Amid fears about global warming, terrorism, disease, and nuclear proliferation, the threat of rocks from space may seem more the province of bad Hollywood movies than front-page news. Even professional astronomers have long dismissed asteroids as undistinguished flotsam and jetsam, would-be planets that circle the sun endlessly in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Their derision left the field of asteroid hunting largely to amateurs and eccentrics.
Only recently have researchers glimpsed the dangers lurking in our deceptively quiet neighborhood. "Impacts are a fact of life in the universe, but when we look up, it's not what we see," says Carolyn Shoemaker, who, together with her late husband, Gene, pioneered ways of spotting asteroids and comets. It was geologists who first noticed the evidence of huge impact craters on Earth that had formed long after the solar system settled into its present form, prompting biologists to speculate on whether those collisions dramatically altered life's evolution. Later, using new technologies on the ground as well as robotic spacecraft, scientists like Shoemaker started to track, catalog, and closely examine the objects.
I'm a little mystified that the writer, or possibly the editor, didn't include the fact that the late Gene Shoemaker was *the* geologist who brought impacts of this kind into mainstream geology; and of course, even more mystifying, is the lack of mention of the SL-9 comet impacts on Jupiter, which buried the derision of the simpletons who derided the role of impact, yet considered themselves scientists.
