英语听力：探索发现 2014-07-13 BBC 地平线：陨石的真相-27
时间：2014-08-26 09:17:41
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（单词翻译）
On 6th October 2008, asteroid1 hunter Richard Kowalski saw something that would change the assessment2 of threats presented by asteroid impacts. The night was proceeding3 normally and up on the screen came another asteroid.
As I continued to make observations throughout the night, it appeared to be moving slightly faster. And this indicates that the object is close to the Earth.
As with any other asteroid, Richard reported what he’s found to the
Minor4 Planet Centre.
I got up in the morning about 7 o’clock and I had a message on the computer saying, “Could not
compute5 an orbit for a particular object.” I grabbed the observations of this object and I
computed6 an orbit and it was immediately apparent, right then, that that object was going to hit the Earth. And, sort of
ominous7 fashion, it said it was in 19 hours.
Following a strict written
protocol8, Tim quickly reported the findings to NASA’s asteroid
investigation9 team in California.
We got a call from Tim Spahr, at the Minor Planet Centre, saying we had an impacter coming in, in less than 24 hours. That woke me up.
NASA’s expert on asteroid orbits, Dr Steve Chesley, raced to verify the data.
The first thing I saw was a 1.000, a 100% probability of impact in less than a day’s time. I’d never seen anything like this outside of simulations and software testing.
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