Via Christianity Today:
This is the first book-length treatment (that I know of) of the NEO problem that aims to describe that problem to audiences not familiar with it. It only partially succeeds in doing that, mainly because the writing shifts between popular and technical voices. In one breath planets are anthropomorphized (Neptune is a wimp, Jupiter a bully), while in another there's a long, complex sentence that's hard to follow because of technical jargon. (For one example, see page 130: "If we then imagine a plane drawn through the Earth and perpendicular to the object's flight path with respect to the Earth, the three-dimensional uncertainty ellipsoid will project onto the Earth's impact plane as a two-dimensional uncertainty ellipse.").This will limit the book's audience, I fear, mainly to those already familiar with NEO issues.
Yeomans marshals every reason I've heard of to study NEOs, to visit them, and to generally move them higher up on everyone's political agenda. NEOs are interesting because they've been around since the beginning of the solar system. They're dangerous because they can kill us. They could be mined for precious metals. They could be a way-station on the trip to Mars. They may tell us something about the origins of life on Earth.
More going on in the heavens.
