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Splash!

  • 14/04/1998

Splash! The last time one hit us was around 65 million years ago. It wiped out the entire dinosaur population along with 70 per cent of Earth's other species and left behind a monster crater nearly 200 kilometres in diameter.

Thankfully, history will not repeat itself, this time. On December 6, Arizona-based astronomer Jim Scotti was scanning the night sky as usual, not expecting to find anything out of the way. But he did. When his computer analysed images obtained from the 77-year-old telescope Scotti was using, he found something big. It was out there. And worse, it was heading right for Earth. In an E-mail to Brian Marsden at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Scotti described the 1.6 km-wide asteroid as standing out "like a sore thumb'.

By early March, new data on the asteroid

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