"What is Moon rock like? Is it a solid like granite making it difficult to mine and tunnel into, or is it more like a light volcanic pumice?"
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Question
Is it possible to predict the fall of a meteors before it's fall? And how could we protect ourselves from this fall?
Meteors (also called shooting stars) are small (from a grain of sand up to a baseball in size) and do no damage. What could threaten us are impacts by asteroids or comets. The atmosphere protects us from small ones, but objects as large as a football filed can do terrible damage, while collision with one more than a mile in diameter could cause a global catastrophe. At 10 miles in diameter, such an impact can cause a mass extinction like the impact that killed al the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Comets and asteroids, especially those larger than a a mile, can be discovered and tracked by telescopes and their time and place of impact predicted years or decades in advance. This search,supported by NASA and the U.S.Air Force, is called the Spaceguard Survey. For more information see the NASA Impact Hazard Webpage [http://impact.arc.nasa.gov]. This page also has links to lots of additional information, including lists of known asteroids that are updated daily.. David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
December 29, 2005
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