Stellar year for Comet Catcher Boattini

Italian discovers six comets in 2008.

For Italian astronomer Andrea Boattini work doesn’t get much better than discovering a comet.

However, the space watcher had the joy of discovering six last year, the most comet discoveries by an Italian for 150 years.

Mr Boattini works for NASA on the Catalina Sky Survey, a project to track near-Earth objects (NEOs) which could potentially be a significant danger were they to rapidly enter the planets atmosphere.

Think back to those disaster films, Deep Impact, Armageddon etc. If Mr Boattini was in one of those films, he’d play the scientist in the white coat who calmly tells the president a massive chunk of rock is going to wipe out the human race in the next 72 hours.

As a big rock spotter, Andrea Boattini spends a lot of his time on constant lookout at the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona. NASA has been charting NEOs since 1998 (coincidentally the same year that Deep Impact was released in the cinemas). There is a massive belt of asteroids past Mars some of which come close to Earth.

The original NASA program was designed to catalogue all NEOs larger than one kilometre (0.62 miles) across.

Since 2005, the program was upgraded to log much smaller asteroids and bits of space debris from 140 metres (460 ft) in diameter and up.

Looking for smaller objects is a much more difficult task, the demanding target NASA has set itself is to have 90 per cent of the NEOs recorded by 2020.

Any object which comes within 45 million km (28 million miles) of Earth is classified as an NEO. If an object comes within 7.5 million km (4.7 million miles) of Earth, that’s when the panic buttons start getting pushed, Andrea Boattini will be straight on the blower to Bruce Willis.

By Dude Law posted January 13, 2009 9:57 AM