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T
HE
L
UCENT
L
IBRARY
OF
S
CIENCE
AND
S
CIENCE
AND
T
ECHNOLOGY
Comets and
by Don Nardo
San Diego • Detroit • New York • San Francisco • Cleveland • New Haven, Conn. • Waterville, Maine • London • Munich
T
HE
L
UCENT
L
IBRARY
OF
T
ECHNOLOGY
Asteroids
Cover: Comet Hyakutake, discovered in 1996, is one of the brightest comets ever discovered, and has a tail
more than 300 million miles long.
© 2004 by Lucent Books. Lucent Books is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc.,
a division of Thomson Learning, Inc.
Lucent Books
®
and Thomson Learning™ are trademarks used herein under license.
For more information, contact
Lucent Books
27500 Drake Rd.
Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535
Or you can visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by
any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web dis-
tribution or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Nardo, Don, 1947–
Comets and asteroids / by Don Nardo.
v. cm. — (The Lucent library of science and technology)
Includes bibliographical references.
Contents: Comets demystified, asteroids discovered—How asteroids and comets formed—Vital
statistics of asteroids and comets—Voyages to the comets and asteroids—How humans will mine
asteroids and comets—When comets and asteroids strike earth.
ISBN 1-59018-286-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Comets—Juvenile literature. 2. Asteroids—Juvenile literature. [1. Comets. 2. Asteroids.] I.
Title. II. Series.
QB721.5N37 2004
523.6—dc22
2003016736
Printed in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Foreword
4
Introduction
7
Mountains in the Sky
Chapter 1
15
Comets Demystified, Asteroids Discovered
Chapter 2
28
How Asteroids and Comets Formed
Chapter 3
41
Vital Statistics of Asteroids and Comets
Chapter 4
55
Voyages to the Comets and Asteroids
Chapter 5
68
How Humans Will Mine Asteroids and Comets
Chapter 6
80
When Comets and Asteroids Strike Earth
Notes
94
Glossary
97
For Further Reading
99
Major Works Consulted
101
Additional Works Consulted
103
Index
107
Picture Credits
112
About the Author
112
Foreword
“The world has changed far more in the past 100 years
than in any other century in history. The reason is not
political or economic, but technological—technologies
that flowed directly from advances in basic science.”
revolution that British physicist Stephen Hawking
describes in the above quote has transformed virtually
every aspect of human life at an unprecedented pace.
Inventions unimaginable a century ago have not only
become commonplace but are now considered neces-
sities of daily life. As science historian James Burke
writes, “We live surrounded by objects and systems
that we take for granted, but which profoundly affect
the way we behave, think, work, play, and in general
conduct our lives.”
For example, in just one hundred years, transporta-
tion systems have dramatically changed. In 1900 the
first gasoline-powered motorcar had just been intro-
duced, and only 144 miles of U.S. roads were hard-
surfaced. Horse-drawn trolleys still filled the streets of
American cities. The airplane had yet to be invented.
Today 217 million vehicles speed along 4 million miles
of U.S. roads. Humans have flown to the moon and
commercial aircraft are capable of transporting passen-
gers across the Atlantic Ocean in less than three hours.
The transformation of communications has been
just as dramatic. In 1900 most Americans lived and
worked on farms without electricity or mail delivery.
Few people had ever heard a radio or spoken on a tele-
phone. A hundred years later, 98 percent of American
4
— Stephen Hawking, “A Brief History
of Relativity,”
Time,
2000
T
he twentieth-century scientific and technological
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