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Re: (meteorobs) Meteor the Movie...
Conrad W Humphrey wrote:
> Hi all,
> Last night I saw a movie on UPN 9 named Meteor at 11:30 EST.
> It's
> about a scientist who discovered a huge meteor 5 kilometers wide and
> heading to earth at a speed of 30 miles per a hour. Then the Russian
> government and United States had to combine nuclear warheads from the
> satellites Hercules and Peter the Great to blow up the meteor, but
> there's a couple of question I wanted to ask.
> Does NASA have a plan in case something like that was to happen?
No, though Congress mandated and funded a NASA study a few years ago
concerning asteroid impacts, the results of which--the Spaceguard Survey
Detection Report--are available at http://ccf.arc.nasadot gov/sst/ . The
other side of the report on interdiction is not, to my knowledge,
available on the web. No worry, though, cause the proceedings of a
planetary defense workshop hosted at Los Alamos in May 1995 are, and
they make for intriguing reading (at http://www.llnldot gov/planetary/ )
> After the show was finished it said the United States had a project
> named
> Icarus to handle a problem like this, is that true?
Icarus, I believe, was a project by a number of MIT grad students to
study the requiements of defending Earth against an incoming, sizeable
asteroid.
> Also, have any of you seen this movie?
Thankfully, no.
Richard Wagner
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