[FPSPACE] That female touch ...

[Jens Kieffer-Olsen]

 In the old Soviet days women were scoring points or badges or
 whatever driving their Ursus tractors across farmlands as a
 first step towards securing a good harvest.

 How at the same time similar and yet different to read about
 the closest call in recent memory from a Tunguska-sized asteroid
 in the Kentucky-based internet magazine "Bella Online - The
 Voice of Women".

 Discovered just over a couple of months ago PHA asteroid
 2009 DD45 passed the Earth over Tahiti at barely twice
 the height of geostationary satellites on March 2nd.
 Bella Online's astronomy editor - Edinburgh lass Barbara
 Melville - writes
 http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art19533.asp :

 [...]
 Robert McNaught of the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia
 discovered the object two days before it flew by.
 [...]
 SpaceWeather describe the object as being around 35 meters
 in diameter, comparing it to a rock that entered the Earth's
 atmosphere in 1908 - the Tunguska Event. On June 30th 1908,
 the rock probably exploded in the sky, resulting in the
 flattening of 80 million trees and the deaths of many animals.
 There were probably human deaths as well, though the region
 was fairly remote. 

 In his article The Tunguska Event--100 Years Later on the
 NASA website, Dr Tony Philips writes, "At 7:17 a.m. (local
 Siberia time), at a height of about 28,000 feet, the
 combination of pressure and heat caused the asteroid to
 fragment and annihilate itself, producing a fireball and
 releasing energy equivalent to about 185 Hiroshima bombs".
 However, had DD45 hit, the effects may have been different.
 [...]

 Well, yes, for Papeete and Evenki are somewhat different
 locations indeed :-)

--
Jens Kieffer-Olsen
Slagelse, Denmark