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EDITORIAL INFORMATION

New discoveries, reported on the covers of The Economist, Time and Newsweek, prove that the chances are good that a deadly asteroid or comet will crash to Earth in the foreseeable future. Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets is the most authoritative, up to date and comprehensive book to introduce the serious science behind provocative predictions that an asteroid or comet might hit the Earth and destroy life as we know it.

Duncan Steel, a world-renowned authority on the comet hazard, describes the latest findings, including the recent comet explosions on Jupiter, surveys the fascinating evidence of past impacts, including the controversial evidence that a meteor impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs (and as recently as 1908 an impact obliterated what was one of the world's largest forests in Siberia), and the bold plans proposed to divert an incoming "death star" before it strikes.

Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets is a compelling account of the threat posed to life on Earth from outer space, and of scientists' response. Killer comets and asteroids populate the cosmos in greater numbers than we have ever imagined. But for the first time, humankind is in a position to prevent calamity. This book makes a compelling case that to waste that oportunity would be both perilous and fool-hardy.

Duncan Steel, PhD, is a research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia and a research fellow at the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics at the University of Adelaide. He has served on both the Detection Committee and the Interception Committee created by NASA to assess the threat of comet and asteroid collisions and investigate technologies to avert such impacts. He is a regular contributor to Sky and Space magazine, and he has been interviewed for numerous stories in the popular press on this subject. He has also appeared in a BBC documentary on the topic.

(Extracted from the press release.)

GENERAL TABLE OF CONTENTS

-Foreword. Arthur C. Clarke.

-1- Fiddling While Rome Burns.
-2- The Swarn around US.
-3- Catastrophic Scenarios.
-4- The World on Fire.
-5- Holes in the Ground: The Evidence for Past Impacts.
-6- The Story of the Stones.
-7- Coherent Catastrophism.
-8- Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
-9- False Security. The Atmosphere's Shield.
-10- Great Efforts, Great Ignorance.
-11- So Began Project Spaceguard.
-12- Showdown at Los Alamos.
-13- Keeping Our Fingers Crossed.

-Epilogue: The Crash of '94.

-Notes, Glossary, Bibliography, Index.

OUR REVIEW

Despite its subtitle, this is not an alarmist work, but a scientifically documented attempt to draw the reader's attention to the real danger that appears to be stalking us. The first conclusion, however, is that it is a little studied phenomenon, at least in its origins, and that unless we initiate an intensive search for these bodies that fill the Solar System, we will not be completely sure about the probability that one of these dreadful impacts may some day occur. This is precisely what the project Spaceguard intends, a project whose technical elements should be able to detect many objects that nowadays remain still unknown to us.

The book is then a cry aimed at making us aware, by explaining in a very colloquial way the facts that are known to us and those we are just beginning to imagine. Therefore, only in this way will it be possible to get the global support needed to finance programs like Spaceguard and to get plans for our protection. Because, in fact, this work also explores the characteristics of the methodology that may free us from this danger, or failing this, minimize it as much as possible.

Perhaps it has been nature itself the one fact that has been doing the best job of making us aware as a community. The impact of the comet Shoemaker-Levy-9 against giant Jupiter, observed in detail by our modern instruments, has shown that the danger is real, and that if this comet had crashed against the Earth instead of this gaseous planet, in this moment life would have ceased to exist. Steel includes this event at the end of his book, a fitting and tangible conclusion to what would otherwise have been taken as another opportunistic attempt to popularize cosmic alarmism.