The Daily Collegian
Published independently by students at Penn State
Wednesday, December 9, 1992  p. 5


Whew! Earth has close call with asteroid

By PAUL RECER
AP Science Writer


WASHINGTON, D.C. - Look out, Earth! Toutatis is coming! Whoops! There it went.
Whew!!

A one-to-two-mile-wide asteroid zipped past the Earth at 12:35 a.m. EST
yesterday, missing the planet by just 2.2 million miles, a hair-thin margin of
safety in celestial terms. A direct hit, say the experts, would produce a global
disaster.

The asteroid was discovered in 1989 by a French astronomer and named Toutatis
after a Gallic god called "protector of the tribe."

Astronomers say if it collided with the Earth, Toutatis could actually be
destroyer of the tribe.

"It would be catastrophic if it hit the Earth," said Don Yeomans, a Jet
Propulsion Laboratory research astronomer. "It would throw up enough material to
shut down the sunlight and the plants would have died. It wouldn't have wiped
out everything, but millions and millions of people would expire."

Yeomans said Toutatis is on an orbit that carries it across Earth's orbit every
four years, passing the planet at varying distances. In 1996 and 2000, the
asteroid will miss by a wide margin. But in 2004, Toutatis passes within one
million miles - about four times the distance between Earth and its moon.

That, said Yeomans, will be the closest approach for at least 200 years, the
limit, so far, of the calculations.

Astronomers say, however, that Toutatis is not the only alien planetoid that the
Earth needs to worry about. "There are millions of truck-sized objects out
there," said Yeomans. And there are thousands more of up to a third of a mile
across. None of these pose a threat, because they would burn up in the
atmosphere before hitting Earth.

But anything of a kilometer - six-tenths of a mile - or bigger wouldn't
completely burn up in the atmosphere and could cause major damage on impact with
the Earth.

Yeoman said Toutatis, when measured against a fixed point in space, was moving
at more than 85,000 miles an hour as it flashed by the Earth.

The explosion of energy caused by Toutatis hitting the Earth at that speed would
be difficult to imagine, experts say.

Eugene Shoemaker, a U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, said that an object the
size of Toutatis would gouge out a crater more than 30 miles across. Some
material would be vaporized, while dust splashed high into the atmosphere would
remain there for long periods of time, blotting out the sun.

If the asteroid hit an ocean, giant waves would roar far inland on virtually all
continents, and then bounce from shore to shore, sort of like what would happen
if an anvil were dropped into a bath tub.

Both Yeoman and Shoemaker said the effects would not match the devastation
caused some 65 million years ago when a much larger asteroid is thought to have
smashed to Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.