EDITORIAL
UH astronomy can blow away asteroids

Talk about superheroes. The esteemed University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy has received an assignment to save the Earth.

Air Force Research Laboratories has awarded the institute $3.4 million for the first year of developing a powerful telescope to track down asteroids that could hit the Earth.

Using a system of smaller telescopes, astronomers should be able to catalogue all the asteroids close to the Earth that threaten to strike. That kind of monitoring would give us humans decades of notice before any collision, and thus time to knock them out of the Earth's path. What a cool mission.