| "Amid all the progress on this planet -- declining losses from terrible diseases and war, rising literacy and the rest -- there remain plenty of planet-scale risks requiring serious focus, from pandemic flu to centuries of locked-in climate change to, yes, collisions with space rocks." THIS WEEK AN ASTEROID will pass not only far inside the orbit of the Moon, but even closer than the 22,300-mile distance where geosynchronous satellites orbit....On longer time scales, of course, the inevitability of discovering an asteroid on a collision course is clear -- which makes figuring out strategies for dealing with that eventuality not simply fodder for screenwriters and novelists. There's plenty more on "Close Encounters of the Rocky Kind" on Dot Earth. |
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At dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
At dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
