10. Can We Survive 2003?
No space news made for more
dramatic headlines in 2002 than the seemingly imminent risk of asteroid impacts.
Over and over.
In the most celebrated
case, an asteroid with a tiny chance of hitting Earth in the year 2019 was
overhyped by the media in July, only to have the odds downgraded days later.
The scenario is one that seems to repeat at least once a year.
For now, there are no space
rocks known to be on a collision course with Earth. At the same time, there
are tons of them out there that have not been found. Particularly taxing for
astronomers will be the small objects, which roam space by the millions, could
devastate a region of the planet, and all of which probably won't be catalogued
for decades to come, if ever.
Meanwhile, asteroids continue
to present new puzzles that make it difficult to imagine what to do with one
that might be headed our way. Some seem to be relatively solid chunks of stone
or metal. Others appear to be rubble piles, loosely bound smaller rocks. Blowing
one of these up would have dramatically varying consequences based on the composition
of the targeted material.
Importantly, the tally of
asteroids with companion moons rose
above 30 during 2002. Many other such pairs await discovery. Deflecting
or destroying an incoming pair of rocks would present a daunting challenge
to engineers who don't yet know how to deal with a lone asteroid.
For those who might worry,
odds
are good we can survive 2003, at least in terms of the threat from
space rocks. And the chances are good that if a big one is coming our way, we'll
know about it years if not decades in advance, astronomers say.
The challenge for scientists,
however, is to begin a concerted effort to find smaller asteroids and unravel
the remaining mysteries of this wildly diverse category of objects and to do
so before they find one bearing down on our planet.
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