Killer Asteroids!

Who: Everyone is invited

What: A talk by IfA astronomer Robert Jedicke

When: Monday, June 2, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. (light refreshments at 6:30)

Where: IfA Manoa Auditorium, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu

How much: Free

Sponsored by: The Friends of the Institute for Astronomy and Mensa

Earth is constantly bombarbed from space by chunks of rock called asteroids. Most of them are too small to produce any damage on Earth's surface, but they increase the mass of Earth by several tons every day. Some of the dust in your living room is actually the burnt and melted remnants of these impacts. While the dust might be a nuisance, a collision with a larger asteroid would really wreck your day.

An asteroid just a half-mile across striking Earth at 45,000 miles per hour—that's 20 times faster and a 100 million million times more massive than a bullet—would produce a blast wave, earthquakes, tsunamis, crop failures, and dust in the atmosphere would likely kill about one quarter of the world's population.

Dr. Jedicke will tell you what IfA astronomers are doing to reduce this risk, how they are finding the dangerous asteroids, and what they will do if they find one that is going to collide with Earth. The odds are only about one in a thousand that this will happen in your lifetime, so if you're a gambler you might choose not to heed this warning. But if you're like most of us who purchase life, home, and health insurance, who think that the FAA does a good job of reducing the risk of plane crashes, and believe that building codes save lives in earthquake-prone regions, then you might like to think about the relatively small cost of insuring our planet against an asteroid impact.

Robert Jedicke has had four professional careers: football player, particle physicist, software engineer, and astronomer. He received his PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Toronto, Canada in 1992. After a brief stint in the professional Canadian Football league with the B.C. Lions, he held postdoctoral positions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and at the University of Arizona's Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, where he worked on the Spacewatch near-Earth asteroid survey. After more than five years creating astronomy-related software at Veeco Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, he accepted a faculty position at the IfA in March 2003. He is currently the manager of the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System, which will discover more asteroids and comets each month than have been found in the past two centuries. Dr. Jedicke has already discovered two comets, and an asteroid is named after his family.