For those able to receive BBC2 and BBC HD, tonight's Horizon at 9pm is entitled "Asteroids: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". Should be interesting for UMSFers.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vv0w8

Thanks for the alert. I just watched it, and I'm pleased to have learnt a few things I didn't know before, and they did cover many things that would have been bad to omit such as the first predicted terrestrial impact. There was still way too much irrelevant music and computer simulation of tumbling rocks and the like for my taste, plus an actor reading stuff in between the scientists' spoken contributions (which weren't always synchronised with their faces moving . . oh well).

Yes, quite a lot of filler in there I thought.

On a related matter, the Purdue/Imperial impact simulator has been updated with a snazzy new interface.

http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

I thought it was a good programme overall, but it was a shame that they didn't include some real images of encountered asteroids rather than not-very-impressive simulations. We have quite a good sample of such images by now, as demonstrated by Emily's growing montage, including lovely rotation movies of Eros from NEAR, Itokawa from Hayabusa, etc. A real puzzle when the material's free of copyright.

Also, why not continue the incredible story of finally finding an asteroid about to hit the Earth with a brief story of its recovery from the African desert? They didn't mention at all that it had been recovered, just implied that it burnt up and left a trail of smoke.

Yes I was given the impression that the meteorite had not been recovered. According to a New Scientist article fragments from this meteorite have been recovered by students and staff from the University of Khartoum:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1684...d-in-sudan.html

http://www.newscientist.com/articleimages/...d-in-sudan.html