More Editorial

• Commentary: New Mexico Tech's plans have some Socorro residents up in arms
• Trib takes: Feb. 20
• Bouquets & brickbats: Feb. 20

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

Yes, asteroids-plunging-to-Earth disasters have become part of popular culture — à la the films "Armageddon," "Deep Impact" and such. But this doesn't mean such debacles are imaginary, or trashy science, or couldn't happen here.

They could, indeed — but Earthlings aren't yet doing all they could to forestall the possibility.

Albuquerque, after all, isn't too far from Arizona's Meteor Crater, still in existence 50,000 years after a meteor struck the Earth with the force of 20 million tons of dynamite.

Closer to us in time was the Tunguska River strike of 1908 in Siberia, in which a White-House-sized asteroid with the impact of 3 megatons to 5 megatons of TNT knocked over trees for hundreds of miles.

A cataclysmic asteroid impact some 65 million years ago in the Yucatan has been blamed for the extinction of the dinosaurs, along with more than 70 percent of Earth's living species.

Fortunately, humans lately have wised up to the possibility that an asteroid could end life here as we know it. And scientists from Sandia National Laboratories are among the most vigilant in preparing to deal with this.

Unfortunately, they're not getting all the support from the federal government that Earth needs.

A Dec. 22 Tribune story by reporter Sue Vorenberg discusses cutting-edge research on asteroid collisions with Earth - including at Tunguska - that Sandia scientists are doing.

Scientists using supercomputers say the collisions happen much more often than was previously believed.

Prior estimates held that Tunguska-like crashes happen every 1,000 years. The new estimates say every 300-400 years. Smaller ones could hit every 100 years or so - and the last such one was 99 years ago, scientist Mark Boslough said.

The article also notes the work of the B612 Foundation, which is working to develop technology to deflect asteroids that threaten Earth. One idea is to launch a missile to smash such asteroids, then send up a "gravity tractor" that could pull the remaining fragments off their Earth-bound trajectory.

Rusty Schweikart, B612 Foundation chairman, says the science behind the idea is already well-tested. What scientists need is about $300 million to build a device that could be tested more conclusively.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is working hard to catalog 90 percent of all possible near-Earth asteroids bigger than 140 meters in diameter by 2020. Schweikart says that's fine, but consider that there are some 400,000 such objects 45 meters in diameter out there, and NASA will have found only about 40 percent of them by 2025.

Seems to us that $300 million a pop for a tractor device or two is a good insurance policy for any asteroids that arrive in the meantime, unannounced.