Cosmic Rock Stars
Posted on: Tuesday, 13 February 2007, 06:00 CST
By Dan Vergano
Asteroids are big hunks of space dust and rock that will eventually smack into Earth and end life as we know it. Or they represent the new frontier of space exploration.
Or both. It depends on how you look at it.
Experts have been wary of asteroids since scientists concluded that one of them ended the Age of the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Scientists such as Stephen Hawking warn that asteroids' relative proximity presents grave dangers to humankind, an alarm supported in a number of recent books, such as William Burrows' The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Save Earth and British astronomer royal Martin Rees' Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning.
But others consider asteroids the next landscape for scientific discovery. "We're looking at the possibilities," says Kelly Humphries, a spokesman for NASA's Johnson Space Center. With NASA planning a moon-exploring spacecraft, Humphries says, "anything robust enough to go to the moon is going to be robust enough for lots of missions."
In December, NASA astronaut Edward Lu told Space.com that plans under study include landing on an asteroid and retrieving rock samples for return to Earth before 2020. (c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Source: USA TODAY
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