Thnaks David -

Its nice to get a civil reply...

Exactly the questions. What role can amateurs play, and what role will they play once the professional systems come online? I don't know. What will the grad students do? I don't know. What will the smaller observatories do? I don't know.

I'm sure that Yeomans and Marsden and others have some thoughts on these, but Europe is in the midst of Kyoto, and Benny almost enitrely focuses the Cambridge Conference on "global warming" - given his intellect, I don't doubt his decision, but it leaves the NEO community without a forum and without his considerable skills -

SW3 fragments - The final diameter estimate before breakup was 2,000 m, 64 fragments, divide through=31.25m, witrh lots of assumptions. Some of these fragments must have been trailed out, but there is a silence - or perhaps its just a percieved silence, due to Benny being focused on other matters...

I suspect that some of these survived perihelion. There will be 2 more perihelion passes before 2022, and the final orbits after fragmentation are probably dicey, and there will be perturbations. The call right now is for meteor showers in 2022, but I am not sure, and would like to know with certainty. My guess is that in this case there are unlikely to be large metallic cores...

Rio Curaca and Rupunini came in at 5 kt or so, so I think 31.25 is a prettty good guess for cometissimal size, at least for SW3. This agrees with the results at Chiemgau, and though Chiemgau is being disputed, I think it is likely to hold. Tunguska would have been 2 to 3 aggregated cometissimals in size.

It occured to me later that you mentioned computer power in terms of mapping an arc. The computer power of which I was speaking earlier was that which is used by image processing search algoriths, and this is pretty massive, with a larger electric power requirment.

You know, you would think after seeing Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter that someone would have realized that comets impact as well as asteroids...