Development & Aid, Environment, Tierramerica

Space Rocks

Jan 20 2002 (IPS) - Asteroids stimulate our imaginations about outer space because these relatively small celestial bodies, which share our solar system, pose a danger to life as we know it a large one should happen to collide with Earth.

The notion of this danger has been disseminated by some million-dollar Hollywood films, which themselves are inspired by a popular scientific hypothesis: an asteroid collided with Earth millions of years ago causing such destruction that it wiped out the dominant species of the age, the dinosaurs.

We can see immense craters today that serve to record these traumas from outer space.

The possibility of another such collision is considered a true danger by some scientists. The U.S. space agency NASA has a service that monitors objects that pass close to Earth. In January 2002 two asteroids came within a relatively short distance. One, measuring one kilometer in diameter, was within 11 million km, not too far considering the vastness of outer space.

The Internet holds numerous websites dedicated to explaining the nature of asteroids and comets. The smaller objects that collide with the Earth's atmosphere are known as meteors, and according to one definition found on the Internet, those that survive the fiery trip and reach the ground intact are called meteorites.

Meteorites may be pieces of asteroids or even of planets, which is why they are the object of a great deal of research, capturing the human imagination, and turning some people into meteorite hunters, who study these space rocks or sell them to collectors.