Resumen de Close Calls.
This article discusses near-Earth asteroids. For nine hours in January, a real-life Deep Impact looked possible. Thankfully, the first asteroid ever predicted to hit Earth within days (and with megaton force) turned out to be a false alarm. At a February conference on planetary defense, Clark R. Chapman faced accusations that he overreacted to early data on Asteroid 2004 AS1, which passed Earth with distance to spare. Keeping watch for collisions today is the Spaceguard Survey, an international network of observatories, but it only looks for objects bigger than a kilometer across. To track them, Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California has proposed legislation to boost planetary defense funding from $3.5 million to $20 million annually.
