- Anyone who saw the Bruce Willis movie
Armageddon and dismissed it as fantasy should think again - the end of
the world really could be nigh.
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- Astronomers say there are some 2,000
asteroids in orbits that COULD lead to a collision with Earth - and they
only know the whereabouts of 200 of them.
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- So they are urging governments to take
the cosmic threat seriously and fund asteroid tracking projects that could
give us warning of an impending cataclysmic "deep impact" collision.
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- British astronomers are desperate for
£5 million funding over a ten year period to do their bit in an international
team searching the heavens.
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- Professor Mark Bailey, of Armagh Observatory,
says: "At the moment, the Americans are discovering most of the asteroids
and we have no direct funding.
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- "Ideally, we want to build a new
telescope somewhere in the southern hemisphere because America's three
are all trained on the northern hemisphere and we have blind spots up there."
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- NASA say it is possible to either blow
up an incoming asteroid, or knock it off course, but they would need time.
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- Professor Bailey says: "This is
the biggest threat facing mankind but it's preventable. As things stand,
though, we could have only 20 seconds warning."
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- The threat from space is indeed terrifying.
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- In August last year, a 1.6km wide asteroid
- big enough to spark a nuclear winter - passed within six hours of the
Earth.
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- "In space terms, that is very close,"
says Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, one of the few politicians to support
a "spaceguard" programme.
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- "It equates to the leader of the
opposition standing at the Dispatch Box, throwing a marble at the Prime
Minister in a fit of pique, and missing his head by 2mm."
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- A direct hit took place in 1908, when
a small comet-like object exploded in the atmosphere above the Tunguska
river valley in Siberia.
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- It had the explosive power of 10 million
tonnes of TNT and had it struck London, everything within the M25 would
have been destroyed. As it was, trees in a 20km radius were levelled.
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- Other countries are starting to take
the threat more seriously.
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- In Japan, a £15 million project
is under way, and France and Germany are pooling resources.
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- The chances of an asteroid or comet hitting
the earth are estimated at 100,000 to one every year.
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- The odds sound generous but are worryingly
short compared with your one in 14 million chance of winning the Lottery.
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- But DTI minister John Battle says the
Government "had to steer a course between the panic of the immediate
moment and deep complacency.
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- "I wish to make it clear that the
chances of the Earth being hit by any large near-Earth object during our
lifetime is remote. But that is not an excuse and such events have happened
in the past."
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