Film Science: Questions for Asteroids - Deadly Impact
Background: heavenly messengers - comets, asteroids, meteors - have long fascinated us but are they more significant that just the occasional, unusual light in the sky?
1. Geologists look for "truth" where?
2. To NASA, how important is the possibility of an Earth - asteroid collision?
3. An impact making a one mile wide crater would have what effect on life on Earth?
4. a) What surface feature on Earth changed Dr. Shoemaker's ideas about the geologic role of impacts?
b) Up until this time, most craters had been believed to be what?
5. Signs of what type of life were found inside a meteorite collected in the Antarctic?
6. How does Earth's atmosphere protect us from most meteors?
7. What is thought to have devastated the forest in an area near the Tunguska River in Siberia?
8. How did underground nuclear tests influence Dr. Shoemaker's thoughts about high energy impacts?
9. What would coesite (squeezed quartz) samples from some crater suggest about its formation?
10. Why were Dr. Shoemaker's ideas about impact effects so slowly accepted?
11. What did firing the rifle bullet at sand reveal?
12. What got Dr. Shoemaker interested in moon craters?
13. What did he feel we could learn about Earth from the look of the moon's surface?
14. Initially, what was the importance of science in space to NASA?
15. What is now accepted as the main geologic process that shaped the face of the moon?
16. Most asteroids are located in a belt between what two planets?
17. Due in part to the Shoemakers' comet and asteroid sightings, what long held, comforting attitude toward the Solar System gradually faded?
18. The 190 mile wide submarine crater off Yucatan is linked to what global catastrophe?
19. What was so unusual, so exciting, about the path of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL 9)?
20. What force controls all these heavenly motions?
21. In the months following the destruction of SL 9, a series of NASA conferences focused on what?
22. What is one idea for deflecting incoming asteroids?