05 06 07 08 09 2010 The "Y2K problem" concerned computers, computer chips and software that may not properly recognize or process dates after December 31, 1999. In addition there were certain other specific dates that may have been troublesome (such as February 29, 2000). Some medical devices and scientific research instruments have computers, computer chips or software integrated into them. The vast majority of medical devices functioned without any potential health or operational problem after December 31, 1999. Some may have had a minor problem, such as displaying an incorrect indication for the year (for example, 00 instead of 2000), and these likely did not significantly affect a patient’s health. A very small number of medical devices encounterd a real problem because of the switch to the new millennium, unless they were corrected prior to being used after December 31, 1999. Y2KTime Bomb The 3rd Millennium starts January 1st, year 2001 NOT year 2000 as many people believe, when using the Gregorian calendar. Year 2000 starts January 1st, year 2000. The difference between the Millennium and year 2000 Psychic celebrities? Some of Hollywood's biggest stars look to the stars and predict our future. Nevermind the fact that they keep getting the year wrong. Late Night W Conan O'Brien We're On Our Way TOC Universal OR Empiricle Discussion "is there a REAL left and right actual body politics" in America? Is it our collective downfall in national economy as when we suggest such over redundant hype, we truthfully are merely contenders in a cosmic or spiritual climate of pluralisms beginning as basic as is 2 choice (right - wrong) divinity. Starring Outplacement Learning Computer Cafe AND Co-Starring "David Nicol Consulting" In TipJar Featuring "The Future Of Giving Away Money" All Board Maximum Web Presence In The New Decade and First Decade Of The Twenty First Century Ahead In "Twenty Zeros" ONLINE "SUNNY VIEWS" SYMPOSIUM Discussing Environment Events, Breaking Stories & Resourcing for Millennial Schedules, Re-Enactments, BookNotes, Membership or Subscription & Any Messages or Reports You want the world to see. Zero Zero intranetworks Sunward Net and additional other SuperInformation Highway forces to bring you New(s) as a thoughtful "column" Host. ". A strong forcast is given for the economy through 2004 although shortly into zero zero will begin event(s) after event like the opening of regular season Major League ballgames. Common People won't win every contest because of telecommunications related events (Y2K spinoffs) therefore world economies will spiral and Quake as usual. Sunward will keep you informed continually in Corporate & E-Business, Networks, Book Release & Celebrations into the Millennium! Fuse In Space To Search Clues For The Old Universe UPDATE ASTEROIDS Spanish Observatory Catch Comet LINEAR Breaking Up By Maia Weinstock Staff Writer, SPACE.com As far as naked-eye stargazers are concerned, this year's passing of Comet LINEAR was a bit of a dud. Though hyped as the next big thing since Comet Hale-Bopp's brilliant performance in the spring of 1997, LINEAR has commanded stargazers to don at least a pair of binoculars if they wanted to catch a glimpse. But several major discoveries made by more high-tech eyes have now turned LINEAR into one of the most intriguing comets ever to zoom by planet Earth. With NASA's Hubble Space Telescope staring straight at LINEAR earlier this month, astronomers were treated to a cometary dazzler when a chunk of LINEAR's nucleus (icy core) literally blew off. Then, observations made this week with the 1-m Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope in the Spanish Canary Islands showed another major explosion of the comet's nucleus. Thanks to these rare sky shows, astronomers say they may soon learn about some of the more critical details of cometary structure and dynamics. "This was a complete surprise to us," said Harold Weaver, one of the researchers at John's Hopkins University who viewed the comet's first outburst. "I couldn't believe it when I brought these images up on the screen -- the first day it looked like a normal comet, and then the next day was just completely different." At the time of the Hubble observations, LINEAR (which stands for Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research) was between 0.7 and 0.8 astronomical units, or about 74 million miles (120 million km), from Earth. Scientists say the side-splitting event started on July 5th as LINEAR began spitting out a large amount of dust, increasing the comet's brightness by over 50 percent in just four hours. "It was probably the biggest outburst in terms of the magnitude of change that I had ever seen in a comet," said Weaver. Next, a significant chunk of the nucleus blasted off and was blown back by the solar "wind" that heats up comets as they streak closer to our closest star. Finally, the comet's brightness normalized, and the split-off chunk was noticed further on down in the comet's "tail," though it had already started to disintegrate. Scientists don't know how big the chunk was that flew off, but evidence so far points to it being what's called "macroscopic" in size -- in other words, centimeters to meters in diameter. Although Hubble's sharp eye gave astronomers a relatively detailed view of the cometary fragmentation, Weaver explained that it's virtually impossible to tell the size of the chunk because "we don't even know how big the nucleus is." On July 25, a similar event was captured by astronomers working at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos in La Palma, Spain. But this time, rather than spitting off a chunk, the nucleus appeared to have completely blown apart. "Something very odd was happening to the comet," said Mark Kidget, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. "The central condensation was seen to be strongly elongated." In other words, the comet had almost completely broken up. Astronomers believe that cometary fragmenations are normal occurrences, though they haven't been able to catch many in action. In fact, Weaver said that the only time scientists have seen something similar to these most recent sightings was with Comet Hyakutake in March of 1996. Though astronomers haven't had sufficient time to perform detailed analysis of the Hubble and Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope images, the events should give them a greater understanding for how the contents of cometary nuclei are put together. "The forces that caused it to break up are incredibly miniscule," said Weaver. "It just shows you how fragile cometary nuclei are." Visit SPACE.com for more space-related news, information, entertainment and multimedia, including videos, launch coverage and interactive experiences. Check out cool space images at our photo galleries. Play great SPACE.com games like Astronorama at http://www.space.com/games. http://search.msn.com/results.asp?q=randy+frushour&RS=CHECKED&FORM=SMCRT&v=1&un=doc, Randy Frushour And 21ST Century Publishing Presents~ "THE NEXT BIG ONE" April 1, 1998 There are several programs that monitor near-Earth objects, including the Spacewatch Project as well as the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking project, operated by NASA and the Air Force. But the plans to avert a projected asteroid strike are still largely in the sci-fi arena - ranging from blasting objects out of the sky with lasers or nuclear weapons to nudging them into different orbits using rocket interceptors. The more dramatic methods will be illustrated in two Hollywood movies due to be released in the next few weeks. "Deep Impact" tells the story of an impending comet collision, while "Armageddon" focuses on an asteroid threat. On a more down-to-earth note, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chairman of a House subcommittee on space and aeronautics, urged President Bill Clinton to restore funding for Clementine 2, an asteroid interceptor experiment that was axed last year in a line-item veto. "This project would have been a low-cost proof of concept for any future attempt to protect our planet from an asteroid collision," Rohrabacher said in a written statement. JET PROPULSION LABORATORY FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 1998 ASTEROID WILL MISS EARTH BY "COMFORTABLE DISTANCE" IN 2028 Asteroid 1997 XF11 will pass well beyond the Moon's distance from Earth in October 2028 with a zero probability of impacting the planet, according to astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. The asteroid "is predicted to pass at a rather comfortable distance of about 600,000 miles (about 960,000 kilometers) in 2028," reported Dr. Donald K. Yeomans and Dr. Paul W. Chodas, JPL scientists who specialize in computing the predicted orbits of comets, asteroids, planets and other bodies in the solar system. Data on the asteroid from March 1990 (well before its discovery in December 1997) was integrated into the orbit calculations by Yeomans and Chodas to arrive at the distance the asteroid will pass Earth. The 1990 observations of the object were found today in the Palomar Planet Crossing Asteroid Survey conducted at Caltech's Palomar Observatory, by JPL's Eleanor Helin and Ken Lawrence and by Brian Roman, formerly of JPL. Original Press Release If you peered into the southern sky tonight through a giant telescope, you might see an asteroid about 244 million miles away, and will have a flirtation with Earth: Thursday, Oct. 26, 2028. It's the kind of date where you pray you'll be stood up. The odds of collision are remote -- about 1 in 3000. Asteroid 1997 XF11 is probably a chunk of rock, but it could also be a collection of rock fragments. It's in orbit around the sun, just as we are, and is at the moment hurtling away from us at a relative speed of 15 miles per second. On the big day, when scientists have calculated that it might brush close enough past Earth to set several billion hearts fluttering, it will likely be traveling about nine miles per second. For now, scientists can't agree on how close the asteroid will get. The estimates range from 40,000 miles -- closer than the moon -- to 600,000. In the worst-case scenario -- a direct hit -- the asteroid could flatten cities, side-swipe a continent, or churn up tidal ocean waves. In the best-case scenario, XF11 will whiz by in a beautiful flash, with Europe getting front-row seats. In intermediate scenarios, the asteroid could brush close enough to Earth to knock out satellite systems and send communication systems, cell phones and your favorite television show haywire. "The chances are it will go away," said Brian Marsden, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who announced the news of the asteroid's trajectory to the world. "We shouldn't even consider doing anything about this until we know there is a real danger." News of Earth's date with the asteroid three decades from now sent thrills of doomsday down the spines of the science world. Buffs raced to scenarios where nuclear missiles from Earth could be launched to deflect the asteroid. Peter Shelus, the astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin who made some of the crucial observations to identify the asteroid in November, was aghast by such thinking. "We really have to step back and say, 'Hey, what's the real situation?' " he said. "We have 88 days worth of observations and we are trying to extrapolate that to 30 years. How accurate do you think your results are going to be?" "We need a big grain of salt to take with what we think is going to happen," he said. "I don't think anyone can sit down definitively and say this will or this won't happen." Blowing up the asteroid might create more problems than it solves. For one, it could turn a solid chunk of rock into a shower of debris that would be much harder to deal with. Even worse, a misplaced atomic blast could push the asteroid right into Earth's path. "They would have to be very careful," said Deborah Goldader, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania, in a sweeping understatement. "If they did it the wrong direction, you might end up worse than you started with. You might be better leaving it alone," she said. Asteroids are large chunks of matter, mostly rock. Most of the asteroids in our solar system are concentrated in a belt between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. Occasionally, asteroids break off from this band and are drawn toward the sun. In rare instances, an asteroid will swing into Earth's path. Scientists speculate that an asteroid collision about 65 million years ago could have wiped out the dinosaurs, by choking off much of the life on the surface of Earth in a plume of debris or by depleting the atmosphere of oxygen. The current asteroid is probably much smaller. As asteroids travel through the solar system -- XF11 takes 21 months to complete an orbit of the sun -- they are tugged by the gravitational force of the planets and the sun. Before the closest fly-by in 2028, for example, this asteroid will come near Earth about 18 times, including a Halloween visit in 2002. All these tugs can affect the scientists' calculations. "What is crucial is how many times in the next 30 years will XF11 come close to another solar system object," said Shelus. "Every time that asteroid goes close to some solar system body, it makes the numerical calculations very, very uncertain. We end up in a chaos situation." Yesterday, the scientists had different numbers. "The closest approach-distance looks like 44,800 kilometers," or about 28,000 miles, said Daniel Durda, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona's Spacewatch program, where a 77-year-old telescope at Kitt Peak first spotted the asteroid during a routine search for such objects. "The width of that error is 2,500 kilometers." "It's going to pass near the Earth, but there is essentially a zero possibility it will hit," he said. In other words, Durda figured that the asteroid will fly by between 26,500 and 29,500 miles from Earth. The moon is about 250,000 miles from Earth. "If you could unwrap the equator from the Earth and stretch it into space that's how close it could come," guessed Goldader. "Or it could come as far away as the moon." Late yesterday afternoon, Paul Chodas, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, guessed the asteroid would get no closer than 600,000 miles, which is well over twice the distance to the moon. "The number will change as we get new data," Chodas said, as XF11 next swings close to Earth in 2000. "I don't expect it to change by more than 10,000 miles, but I can be wrong." How much damage might the asteroid cause were it to actually collide with Earth? That depends on its mass and its speed, and scientists don't have a very good handle on either. "It's pure speculation how much damage" a collision would cause, said Shelus, the UT-Austin researcher. "The amount of damage would depend on where the object might fall. If it falls in the middle of Austin, it could cause a great deal of damage." "If it falls on New York City," he quipped, "it's not going to be any loss at all -- we can do without New York City." "If the asteroid falls on the steppes of central Asia there might be very very little real damage to the world. If it were to fall into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it could cause a disaster because of the tidal wave it throws up." Goldader, the University of Pennsylvania astronomer, added some perspective: "People shouldn't panic," she said. "This has probably happened all the time in the past, and we just haven't noticed." From the Author's. On October 26, 2028, Asteroid 1997 XF11 will be a big hit -- or not. At the moment, astronomers are saying that 1997 XF11 may not fulfill the first prediction -- of coming closer to Earth than the moon. Don't sigh too luxuriantly, for impacts do occur. Look up at the pockmarked face of our moon, and the images of other planets like Mercury. The asteroids themselves show evidence of many impacts. Although Earth has undergone much renovation, with erosion and weathering contributing to the destruction of impact evidence, geologists have so far found at least 150 "impact structures" on Earth. These include the big Arizona crater beloved by tourists and movie makers, and the 65 million-year-old Chicxulub structure in the Yucatan, thought by many to have contributed heavily to the extinction of the dinosaurs (and 70 percent of all species). It's bad enough to have a solitary object hurtle down, for on our now heavily-peopled planet there's no safe place for it to land -- not even the ocean (deadly tidal waves) or Antarctica (earthquakes, ice breakup, sea level rise). A worse scenario was graphically demonstrated by the July 1994 collision of fragmented Comet Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter. During this spectacular show, a chain of black spots spread across the planet as chunks of Shoemaker-Levy punched through its dense atmosphere. Similar "multiple impact events" have occurred on Earth. Recently such an event was found by John G. Spray of Canada's University of New Brunswick; Simon P. Kelley of the U.K.'s Open University; and David B. Rowley of the University of Chicago. They found a similar age -- 214 million years -- for five impact structures in France, Canada, the Ukraine and the United States... Zero Point Field Monday September 18 4:42 PM ET Scientists Eye Dangerous Asteroids By IAN PHILLIPS, Associated Press Writer LONDON (AP) - They may only strike every 100,000 years on average, but life-threatening asteroids could be heading Earth's way, and scientists said Monday they want a closer look. A panel set up this year by the British government to assess the risk of asteroids slamming into the planet called for an international program to build a powerful $22.5 million telescope in the southern hemisphere. ``The risk is very real - and very tiny - but with awful consequences, and we ought to be doing something about it,'' said Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) and a member of the panel, which published its report on Monday. Although millions are already being spent trying to track Near Earth Objects, or NEOs, scientists acknowledge they're very much in the dark. Asteroids near Earth travel at between 10 and 20 miles per second, making them hard to detect. As a result, scientists watch their orbits to predict their expected course. According to the U.S. space agency NASA (news - web sites), at the beginning of 2000, only about half the estimated 500-to-1,000 near-Earth asteroids measuring half a mile across or larger - big enough to cause a global catastrophe - had been detected. The proposed 10-foot telescope would see further and wider and be able to pick up the faintest of glows, the panel said. Operated robotically, it would supplement the coverage of other telescopes in operation in the northern hemisphere. ``It's a question of giving ourselves a chance,'' said Robert Massey, an astronomer at Britain's Royal Observatory in Greenwich. ``We would be able to spot trouble 10 to 100 years away and could take steps accordingly.'' ``On the other hand, if it were a year away, probably the best we could do would be to duck,'' Massey said. Objects hitting the Earth have caused devastating damage over millions of years. One impact off the coast of what is now Mexico 65 million years ago is thought to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Another impact in 1908 in Siberia knocked down trees with its shock waves over hundreds of square miles. The report listed nine objects that have come within two lunar distances of the Earth - about 497,120 miles - since 1991. In May 1996, an object 984 feet wide, called JA1, came as close as about 298,000 miles to the planet. It also called for further study into how to destroy a sizable object on a collision course with the planet. One possibility is a nuclear explosion by the side of an asteroid to divert it from its course. Recent Hollywood blockbusters ``Armageddon'' and ``Deep Impact'' have heightened public awareness about asteroid disasters. NASA has already earmarked more than $1 billion to gain a better scientific understanding of asteroids, which are rocky or metallic bodies hurtling through space mostly in a band between Jupiter and Mars. One British lawmaker, whose grandfather had an asteroid named after him to acknowledge his lifelong campaign to warn of impending disaster, welcomed Monday's proposal. ``We are playing Russian roulette with the future of the planet if we do nothing about it,'' said Lembit Opik. ``It would be a bit like Armageddon, but probably we would not want to send Bruce Willis.'' The panel is chaired by Dr. Harry Atkinson, formerly of the Science and Engineering Research Council and a past chairman of the European Space Agency's council.