Robert Jedicke
Robert Jedicke has had four professional careers: football, particle
physics, astronomy, and software engineering. He received his PhD in
experimental particle physics from the University of Toronto, Canada,
for work on flavor dependence in the production of charm-strange
mesons. After a brief stint in the professional Canadian Football
league with the B.C. Lions, he held post-doctoral positions at Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, IL, and at the University
of Arizona's Lunar & Planetary Laboratory where he worked on the
Spacewatch near Earth asteroid survey. He spent more than five years
at Veeco Corporation in Tucson developing image analysis software for
interferometers before accepting a faculty position at the Institute
for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in March 2003. He is
currently the manager of the Pan-STARRS moving object processing
system that will discover more asteroids and comets each month than
have been found in the past two centuries. He has discovered two
comets and an asteroid is named after his family.
Killer Asteroids!
The Earth is constantly bombarded from space by chunks of rock called
asteroids. Most of them are too small to produce any damage at the
surface of the Earth but they increase the mass of the Earth by
several tons every day. Some of the dust in your living room is
actually the burnt and melted remnants of these impacts. While the
dust might be a nuisance, a collision with a larger asteroid would
really wreck your day.
An asteroid just a half-mile across could strike the Earth at any time
at 45,000 miles per hour - that's 20 times faster and a 100 million
million times more massive than a bullet. The combined effects of the
impact energy, blast wave, earthquakes, tsunamis, crop failures, and
dust loading in the atmosphere would likely kill about one quarter of
the world's population.
Dr. Jedicke will explain what astronomers at the University of Hawaii's
Institute for Astronomy are doing to reduce this risk, how we're
finding the dangerous asteroids, and what we'd do if we found one that
was going to hit. The odds are only about 1 in a 1000 that it will
happen in your lifetime so if you're a gambler you might choose not to
heed this warning. But if you're like most of us who purchase life,
home, and health insurance, who think that the FAA does a good job of
reducing the risk of plane crashes, and believe that building codes
save lives in earthquake-prone regions, then you might like to think
about the relatively small cost of insuring our planet against an
asteroid impact.
