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Several *known* asteroids are over 300 miles in diameter, including Pallas, Vesta and Ceres (the largest at 600 miles), and about 30 known ones are in the 150-300 mile range. Only 26,000 of the suspected 100,000 asteroids (within the belt, that is) have been catalogued so far, about 3000 of which we've figured out the orbits for. Ceres makes up about 30 % of the estimated mass of all asteroids in the belt, so it isn't very likely that there are any other 300 mile diameter asteroids within it that we don't know about. Those aren't the ones we really need to worry about anyway. It's the ones outside of the asteroid belt that scientists ocassionally spot and send the world into a panic with their reports of "this asteroid might come within 60,000 miles in the year 2024." In 1989 an asteroid discovered only days before its approach missed the earth by 900,000 miles-- it wasn't quite the size of Texas but it was big enough to cause Armageddon (about 20,000 hydrogen bombs worth). It only takes a 6 mile wide asteroid to block out the sun for several years. The one that wiped out the dinosaurs was the big enough to take a chunk out of the Yucatan-- once again, not quite the size of Texas, but it only takes a few miles to do us in. Obviously "Armageddon" made things big for dramatic effect-- the average American has no idea a 6 mile wide asteroid can block out the sun and destroy life as we know it, but tell him it's the size of Texas and he figures at least an area as big as Texas is destroyed (although that's not really true either because meteors burn up as they go through earth's atmosphere and gradually become smaller before impact). Furthermore they couldn't have had any cool asteroid landing scenes with a six mile wide rock. Let's face it-- "Armageddon" wasn't made to entertain scientists-- it was made to entertain the masses, and it apparently did a good enough job of that to be last year's number one grossing movie.
C. F. L.
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