In last month’s article I discussed some of the many close encounters between Earth and celestial objects that had occurred in recent decades. This came on the heels of a series of events that, for a brief few days at least, riveted the world’s attention on the bigger picture of the cosmic environment. In the wake of the events of February, the well known Professor of Theoretical Physics, Michio Kaku, wrote in Newsweek,
“It’s sobering to realize that we live in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery. There are about a million asteroids that orbit near the path of Earth. Of these, NASA estimated in 2007 that perhaps 20,000 can one day pose a direct threat to Earth . . . Today our instruments are revealing how frequent near misses really are, and the results are deeply disturbing.”
While the furor seems to have died down as of this writing, (late March) the close encounters continue to accumulate.… Read the rest


