Asteroids A History

Providing insights into the evolution of scientific ideas and the ebb and flow of scientific debate, Curtis Peebles shows how ideas about the orbiting boulders have evolved. He describes how such phenomena as the Moon's craters and dinosaur extinction were gradually, and by some scientists grudgingly, accepted as the results of asteroid impacts. He tells how a band of icy asteroids rimming the solar system, first proposed as a theory in the 1940s, was ignored for more than forty years until renewed interest and technological breakthroughs confirmed the existence of the Kuiper Belt. Covering all aspects of asteroid investigation, Peebles also chronicles the discovery of Shoemaker-Levy 9, a comet with twenty-two nuclei that crashed into Jupiter in 1994, releasing many times the energy of the world's nuclear arsenal.

Curtis Peebles has published ten books and more than forty articles. He is the author of Watch the Skies: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth (1994) and coauthor of Flying Without Wings (1999), both published by the Smithsonian Institution Press.