WILL COMET HALE-BOPP COLLIDE WITH

     MIDWESTERN UNITED STATES?

    July 23rd 1995 astronomer Alan Hale (no relation to the Skipper from Gilligan's Island) of the Southwest Institute for Space Research and Thomas Bopp an amateur stargazer in New Mexico discovered a new light in the sky, a major new comet only 650 million miles away. Don't let that distance give you any comfort, however, for that massive ball of glittering ice and rock is hurtling toward earth and will cross that staggering distance of interplanetary space in just a few short months!

     The Hale-Bopp comet is being compared to Halley's comet, and is outshining the competition. This new comet is brighter and three quarters bigger, weighing in at a whopping 25 miles in diameter. Best guesses on the size of the object which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs when it smashed into the Yucatan was only 10 miles across.

     NASA and other groups of astronomers are publicly stating that the comet will pass within 123 million miles in the spring of this year. Privately, the scientific world is very concerned about the chance of impact and say that the public estimation is very generous in its safety margin. An anonymous source at a major university in Baltimore disclosed that part of the mission to Hubble this month was to augment the space based telescope on the comet to more closely track its course and the true danger of collision with the planet. If the comet is on a collision course, it may already be too late.

     "I have told those tired and greedy old men in Washington for years that we are constantly in danger of an impact and that all efforts should be made to deploy nuclear weapons in space to burst those objects into smaller pieces which might more easily be destroyed in the furnace created by entering our atmosphere," Rosenweitz opined, "...but they were concerned that the radicals in underdeveloped nations would never believe the true purpose of the orbiting missile platform. The so called "Star Wars" initiative was never undertaken in relation to the Soviets, but in tandem with them, because by Reagan's administration all the major powers knew the dangers of invasion from the stars, both by organic and inorganic invaders...but the idiotic bureaucracy which is the only natural result of democracy won and the whole project was scrapped. To our possible ultimate ruin, I might add. God save us from a rabble who think they can rule themselves when all it can concern itself with is drunkenness, fornication, and video games. Now get out, there are a few things I'd like to get done before spring time. Maybe you have something important you'd like to do before the end of the world, eh?"

     Regardless of the inevitable Chicken Little doomsayers, there is no question that the evening sky will be of increasing interest to all of us as the newly discovered comet continues to grow brighter with each passing night.

    For a list of currently visible comets and their trajectories visit:
http://encke.jpl.nasa.gov/whats_visible.html