2007 Top News Stories

In 2005, Congress asked NASA to create a plan to track most killer asteroids along with methods to deflect the potentially catastrophic ones. In March of 2007, NASA released a report, which basically said that this task was too expensive, so it would not get done. Due to insufficient funding by congress, NASA Can Not Pay for Killer Asteroid Hunt.

Stephen William Hawking was born 300 years after the death of Galileo (January 8, 1942)in Oxford, England. At the age of 8, his family moved with him to St Albans, where he began to attend St Albans School three years later. He eventually attended University College, Oxford, his father's alma mater. While his father wanted him to study medicine he preferred mathematics. Neither got their wish as mathematics was not available at University College, so he studied physics instead.

The STS-117 mission was a bit hairy for the crew aboard the space Shuttle Atlantis. First, sections of a thermal blanket were found to be peeled back, bringing to everyone's minds the memory of the space shuttle Columbia. NASA extended the mission two extra days and added a fourth spacewalk to the mission in order to make in-space shuttle repairs. While NASA engineers did not believe the extreme heat of reentry would damage the shuttle or risk the lives of the crew, they were concerned it would still require some repair work by ground crews.

In February, we reported a disturbing story, which we said illustrated that astronauts are human, too. It was that about a NASA Astronaut Charged with Kidnap Attempt.

In September, we were hearing some vague rumors about a meteorite in Peru making villager sick. Initial reports from residents of a remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia, described a large explosion, which was first thought to be a plane crash. The mysterious meteorite left a 100-foot-wide (30-meter-wide) and 20-foot-deep (six-meter-deep) crater.