incoming !

it’s less than 20 years since killer asteroids started poking our awareness, after one just missed the planet, without our knowledge until it had passed

as we started learning more about these renegade rocks, the Cosmos put on an impressive show with Shoemaker-Levy, to demonstrate what one of these rocks can do, then threatened us with the early perceived potential of Hale Bop

there’ve been some big rocks recently that passed closer than the Moon, including one the size of the Tunguska boulder [imagine something like that over New York] that was just barely too high to hit one of the outer satellites [bah! who needs television broadcasts anyway, eh?]

now that we’re looking for them, we can see some of these rocks coming ~ by a few hours, or perhaps a few days

a Nature News feature looks at what happened last fall when we figured out one of them definitely had us in its cross-hairs

20 seconds after it penetrated the atmosphere, the asteroid exploded in a fireball that was seen across the Sudan and Egypt and dusted the sparsely populated Nubian Desert with a shower of hot, glowing embers

the initial search for fragments turned up several kilograms of alien material, with some pieces the size of a big potato

good thing it was only a drill

more next time

Blessed Be