SINE

This is Sine again. It may seem strange to you that a Chinese is telling you about NASA. But NASA is important, and people like me, people interested in these things, pay attention.

In 1993, NASA pointed radar at an asteroid they gave name Toutatis. They used the 230 foot-wide antenna dish at the Mojave Desert tracking station to capture radar echoes with a 112-foot-wide antenna to make pictures of Toutatis on Dec. 8, 9, 10 and 13.

These show Toutatis is 4 miles across and split in two pieces.

At that time, NASA guess estimated a 1-in-l0,000 chance an asteroid one third mile wide or more may hit Earth, destroy food crops and ‘maybe end civilization as we know it.’ Sometime during our generation.

Then, in 2012, California and Nevada saw a flash they surmised was about ten feet wide that fragmented and fell over the area. Meteor researcher Peter Jenniskens from (SETI), Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, crowd-sourced many people to collect what fell and got about 2 pounds from a maybe 80,000 pound piece of an asteroid. In the December 21, 2012 issue, Science magazine says more analysis is coming.

Which is interesting, showing we don’t know about when or what next.