英语听力：探索发现 2014-07-16 BBC 地平线：陨石的真相-28

 An asteroid¹ strike would create a huge explosion. NASA feared this might even be mistaken for a nuclear bomb. 

 

We wanted folks to know this was a natural event by Mother Nature rather than some sort of man-made event like a missile or something dreadful. 

 

Information passed rapidly up the chain of command. NASA headquarters notified the White House that this was coming. Everyone wanted to know where it would strike. NASA predicted a remote area of the Nubian Desert. 2:45 in the moring, NASA were proved right. 

 

The explosion created a vast fireball burning as hot as the Sun. it was so big and so hot this image was captured by a weather satellite. And yet the object that caused it was only four metres across, smaller than the asteroid which exploded over Chelyabinsk. 

 

I definitely think the impact was a wake-up call. I have to admit I never thought I’d see that in my career where we would discover something and it would hit the Earth later that day. What I was worrying about that impact was that the asteroid was too small to detect until it was very, very close to the Earth. Of course, for Chebarkul, it wasn’t even spotted² until it was already here. But we are getting better at spotting smaller asteroids³. 

 

On the same day that Chebarkul was hit, another asteroid, similar in size to the object that created the Barringer Crater⁴, came within just 28,000 kilometres of the Earth. 

 

1 asteroid   

n.小行星；海盘车(动物)

参考例句：

• Astronomers have yet to witness an asteroid impact with another planet.天文学家还没有目击过小行星撞击其它行星。
• It's very unlikely that an asteroid will crash into Earth but the danger exists.小行星撞地球的可能性很小，但这样的危险还是存在的。

2 spotted   

adj.有斑点的，斑纹的，弄污了的

参考例句：

• The milkman selected the spotted cows,from among a herd of two hundred.牛奶商从一群200头牛中选出有斑点的牛。
• Sam's shop stocks short spotted socks.山姆的商店屯积了有斑点的短袜。

3 asteroids   

n.小行星( asteroid的名词复数 )；海盘车，海星

参考例句：

• Asteroids,also known as "minor planets",are numerous in the outer space. 小行星，亦称为“小型行星”，在外太空中不计其数。
• Most stars probably have their quota of planets, meteorids, comets, and asteroids. 多数恒星也许还拥有若干行星、流星、彗星和小行星。

4 crater   

n.火山口，弹坑

参考例句：

• With a telescope you can see the huge crater of Ve-suvius.用望远镜你能看到巨大的维苏威火山口。
• They came to the lip of a dead crater.他们来到了一个死火山口。