A Meteorite With Our Name on It

I would get a kick out of offering you to a Norwegian website, Aftenposten.no, if the story were funnier. Here’s the link, at any rate: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1346411.ece.  They report a meteorite that crashed into northern Norway in the early hours of Wednesday, and quote a local scientist as saying it hit "with an impact comparable to the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima."  (I’d approach this with caution.  Any signs of damage?)  They give credit to a farmer who apparently had the presence of mind–and the time–to take a picture of it.  (NOTE ADDED JUNE 17: Peer review is important in science; see a link posted by a sharp-eyed reader.  The Hiroshima comparison was indeed overblown.) (Below: Perseid meteor shower, August 1995.  Credit: S. Molau and P. Jenniskens, NASA/Ames Research Center.) Shooting stars are passing fun to see if you’re up late, in a place with clear seeing, and you happen to look in the right direction at the right split second.  But more than 99 percent are the dying embers of objects that vaporize as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere.  Impacts are rare–witness the lack of craters on this planet, and the reverence with which museums treat the meteorites in their collections.  There are a few impact craters, though, mostly obscured by time and geology, which–in case you’ve been hiding under an igneous rock for the last quarter-century–are believed to have been created violently enough to have caused mass extinctions on Earth.  Astronomers are convinced there will be more–maybe tomorrow, maybe a billion years from now–and there’s a struggling movement to see if we can track any Near-Earth Objects (NEOs for short) that may threaten us.  (Click HERE for more on NASA’s program on NEOs.) (The crater at Manicouagan, Quebec, believed to be 206 to 214 million years old.  There has been considerable debate over whether the impact that created it caused the mass extinction that preceded the the Jurassic Period, which was dominated by the great sauropod dinosaurs.  The original rim of the crater is gone, but was probably about 60 miles in diameter.  NASA image from orbit.) Astronauts Rusty Schweikart (Apollo 9 in 1969) and Ed Lu (two Shuttle flights and a Space Station stay in 2003) have lent their names to the B612 Foundation, which is pushing to have us capable of nudging an Earth-threatening asteroid from its current orbit by 2015.  Quixotic?  Perhaps, they concede.  But they have some serious scientists on their side, and the craters to prove they’re not completely crazy.  A small, small chance of a big, big thing happening to the Earth.