There was a time when "Italians From Outer Space" ....
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| Italians From Outer Space |
..... was only a jokey LP title by Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias, an excellent spoof rock band, formed in Manchester, England in 1973.
I was living there at the time, and saw this band on the club circuit, especially as the Punk Rock scene got going. Anyway, that thought crossed my mind as I read this story on the BBC web site, about an Italian astronomer Andrea Boattini. who has spotted Six comets in one year, which is the most found by an Italian astronomer since the mid-19th Century, even if it is not a world record.
He is part of the the Catalina Sky Survey, which is part of a NASA project to find and track near-Earth objects (NEOs) ..... Comets, Asteroids, and anything else that could bump into us. Asteroids are far more common in the Solar System than comets, and potentially far more hazardous to Earth. As they are mostly rockier, smaller and less spectacular than comets, they are usually harder to find, but there is a vast belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.
The team that Andrea Boattini is a part of is looking for NEOs larger than one kilometre (0.62 miles) in diameter, and has found 763 asteroids and 82 comets in that category. That is 81% of the estimated total of near-Earth asteroids wider than 1km. However new technology means that their task has been expanded to include logging NEOs as small as 140m (460ft) in diameter. The target is to find 90% of these by 2020.
Why is this work important?
Well when you realise that a rock about 50m wide, which exploded over the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908 (Known to all X Files followers and UFO fans as "The Tunguska Event"), levelled a vast area of forest, and the impact energy was comparable to a modern nuclear weapon of between 10 -15 megatons ...... you can see how big a bang one of these NEOs can cause!
If you want to see the effects of one smallish nuclear weapon, go here and select your target of choice e.g Washington. Click on map to place explosion site in region. So keep up the good work Andrea!!
Note: An object is classed as an NEO if it comes within 45 million km (28 million miles) of Earth's orbit. Astronomers call that within 0.3 astronomical units (AU) - one unit being the distance of the Earth from the Sun. If the distance is only 0.05AU or less it is a potentially hazardous object.
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