Fire In The Sky

Bvtn 523.44 DIL . . 2019 . . Gordon L. Dillow (AZ Journalist)

https://gordondillow.com/

History, a few interviews, some reasonably current information

• p1 meteor over Arizona 2016 June 2, light and sound, 500 tonnes TNT, not detected beforehand
• p7 Meteor Crater impact, 50 Kya, 18 km/s, 50 meter diameter, nickle-iron
  • p12 nothing lives inside 5 km, 800 km2 stripped bare, 1200 m crater, 170 m deep
  • p18 300,000 visitors per year
• p31 4 kg meteorite 1954 Sylacauga Alabama hits 34 yo Anne Hodeges, in Tuscaloosa Museum of Natural History
  • p32 many other "unconfirmed" cases and deaths
• p34 Piazzi 1801 Ceres Himmelpolizei . . 1802 Pallas . . 1807 Juno Vesta

• p36 NASA $850M probe to Psyche Launch 2022 Arrive 2026

• p39 1997 XF11 close pass 2028 . . . 5km 4179 Toutatis next close approach 2029
• p40 city-killer-sized twice per century (somewhere)
• p43 400 discovered by 1900
• p40 Lawyer Daniel M. Barringer, Princeton 1879, mining, 1896 Commonwealth Gold/Silver Mine in sw Arizona

• p50 Dr. Albert E. Foote, collectable minerals, gathered >100 meteorites, one 200-pounder; then Volz collected 20,000 pounds, $1.25/pound

• p53 1891 prominent scientst Grove Karl (G.K.) Gilbert claimed steam explosion
• p56 Western Union Telegraphic Codebook 1903
• p57 Barringer assumes million tonne metal asteroid, claims mining patent, plans to dig out iron 200 feet deep, starts digging 1904, drills down to 1000 feet
• p65 1929 astronomer Forest Ray Moulton calculates asteroid destroyed by impact, Barringer dies of heart attack age 69
• p66 UAZ John L. Lewis, Mining the Sky, 2014 Asteroid Mining 101, chief scientist for Deep Space Industries
  • Platinum Group Metals not worth it except as byproduct of space construction material harvest
• p71 Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) act of 2015 exempts American citicesns from 1967 Outer Space Treaty
• p74 1971, IAU 15 km Barringer Crater on the far side of Moon
• p75 Tunguska June 30, 1908, 1927 Kulik expedition

• p87 Cosmic pluralism, In 1838 Scottish author/minister Thomas Dick claims 21,891,974,404,480 living inhabitants in Solar System, 5 billion on moon

  • based on surface area and population density of England
• p87 1870 William Herschel (discoverer of Uranus) claims fornicating man-bats on Moon

• p89 1946 Robert S. Dietz argues almost all lunar craters meteoric

• p90 Gene Shoemaker 1928, Caltech geology masters at age 21, 1950 USGS search for uranium, saw Meteor Crater with wife Caroline

  • p93 1960 Shoemater finds quartz allotrope "coesite" in Meteor crater and in 15 mile wide circular depression around Nördlingen Germany

• p93 200 confirmed impact craters, 300km 2Gya Vredefort the largest

• p95 Shoemaker 1963 Addison's disease, no astronaut, but helped train Apollo astronauts

• p96 in 1956 Clair Patterson dated Meteor Crater meteorites with lead isotopes

• p99 Shoemaker and Glo Helin started the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey in 1973

  • moon craters extrapolate to two thousand NEOs bigger than 800 meters
• p100 NEO Asteroid 5496 discovered by Helin in 1973
• p102 15kT airburst somewhere about once per year
• p102 airburst over Mediterranian, in 2002 General Pete Worden spoke of consequences of that occuring over India/Pakistan instead
• p106 Alvarez (geologist Walter and Nobel physicist Luis) thin red clay layer outside Gubbio Italy linked to K-T extinction,
  • p109 66 Mya 10 km 100 million MT, hundred miles wide crater

  • p112 iridium, Science June 1980 paper

• p116 Wolfgang Pauli's cabaret-dancer wife left him "Had she taken a bullfighter I would have understood. But a chemist?"

• p118 1978 Glenn Penfield finds large circular structure buried underground and underwater in old magnetig and gravity surveys

  • presents paper with Antonio Camargo, but a 1988 paper with Alan Hildebrand and David Kring made the case.

• p121 1993 David Levy and Carolyn Shoemaker at Palomar find comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, compute collisions on July 16 1994.
  • Fragment G, six million megatonnes, 10,000 km scar, This lead to Spaceguard.

  • p125 Paul Weissman author of "Big Fizzle is Coming" in Nature, later noted that 'fizzle' is a Yiddish work meaning 'Great big humongous Jupiter-shaking comet explosion.'

• p126 Astronomer Tom Gehrels was a teenaged WW2 Dutch resistance fighter and British commando.
• p126 Spacewatch telescopes at Kitt Peak used first CCD cameras
• p129 Congressional funding authorization 1997, find 90% of potentially catastrophic NEOs (800m) over the next decade
• p130 later expanded to 90% of 150 meter objects by 2020
• p131 Gene Shoemaker killed in July 18 1997 crash on dirt road near Alice Springs (Toyota Hilux Truck vs Toyota Land Cruiser)

  • ashes aboard 1998 Lunar Prospector moon probe

• p137 [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer#NEOWISE_(pre-hibernation) | NEOWISE ]] warm followup to WISE

• p139 "54yo" (1963) Richard Kowalski 9000 foot Mount Lemmon observatory, Catalina Sky Survey

  • Amateur turned pro in 2005
  • 60 inch f/1.6 reflector NEO-finder with 10560x10560 CCD 5 square degrees, 4 images in 10 minutes, 250 fields per night , also remotely operated followup, and a 30 inch wide-field Schmidt on nearby Mount Bigelow
  • former Air Force radar-tracking station, 26 mile road
• p146 Torino scale - none currently larger than zero
• p147 2004 Apophis, 2029 pass within 30,000 km, closer than comsats

• October 6 2008 TC3 spotted, entry over Sudan Nubian Desert 5:46am the next day

  • p150 11 kg of fragments found by University of Khartoum students
• p150 2014 AA, exploded over Atlantic 20 hours later
• p150 June 2, 2018 Kowalski spotted 2018 LA, burned up over Botswana

• p151 2011 CQ. 1 meter approached within 5500 km of Earth. WT1190F rocket body

• p160 Pew Research Poll, 62% said search important, 9% said a waste of time and money

• p160 2017 'Oumauamua

• p163 2012 DA14 later named 367943 Duende ( 50 meters ) flyby within 27,700 km on February 15 2013, 16 hours after the unexpected Chelyabinsk meteor

• p165 Chelyabinsk most radioactively contaminated place in the world (er, how about Bikini?), 1957 explosion at Mayak plutonium processing plant
  • 20 meter asteroid, 19 km/s, 500 kT, shockwave arrived after 90 seconds while people looked out windows, 1500 injured

• p170 NASA 2019 NEO program budget $150M, 19,000 discoveries as of late 2018, director Lindley Johnson "Planetary Defense Officer"

  • T-shirt "Asteroids Are Nature's Way of Asking: How's That Space Program Coming Along?"

  • 34?? page 1994 Air Force white paper "Spacecast 2020" Original 486 page volume 2 volume 3 edited executive summary

  • 1995 Air Force released previously classified data on hundreds of asteroid airbursts

• p176 not Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which sterilizes space probes

• p179 1967 MIT Course 16.74 Advanced Space Systems Engineering, Professor Paul Sandorff, Icarus Project

• p186 1993 Los Alamos Near-Earth Object Interception Workshop

  • Edward Teller suggested a one-gigaton nuclear bomb, "big enough to blow up Ceres"
• p188 Controversy over bombs in space, prohibited by 1967 Outer Space Treaty

• p193 LLNL 2018 asteroid deflection plan Options and Uncertainties in Planetary Defense

• p194 Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response -
  • either 10 years lead time and 80 kinetic impactors 10 tonnes each ... or a nuke
• p197 2014 NASA survey, 200 people, 57% support nukes against small asteroids, 85% support against large asteroids

• p214 2014 TTX, table top exercise, Pasadena Texas 2013 TTX, Pasadena California, https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/pd/cs/