Mark Boslough is an American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, research professor at University of New Mexico, fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry,[1] and chair of the Asteroid Day Expert Panel.
An expert on planetary impacts and global catastrophes, Boslough's work on airbursts challenged the conventional view of asteroid collision risk and is now widely accepted by the scientific community.
[4] His hypothesis was popularized by the documentaries "Tutunkhamun's Fireball" (BBC),[5][6] (recipient of Discover Magazine's Top 100 Science Stories of 2006)[7] and National Geographic's "Ancient Asteroid".
[12] In 2011, he presented a paper at the IAA Planetary Defense Conference in Bucharest, Romania, in which he stated, "It is virtually certain (probability > 99%) that the next destructive NEO event will be an airburst.
[1] In 2014, Boslough delivered a major address on "death plunge" asteroids that can pose a sudden danger to Earth at the second Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands.
Also in 2014 he talks about his interest in asteroids to Toni Feder of Physics Today: "In his childhood home in Colorado, says Boslough, "there was a left-brain right-brain thing going on, with fiction and nonfiction in the same household.
[31] He also received verbal and physical threats before he successfully defended a lawsuit (Ramey v. Boslough) in which the ownership of a four-wheel-drive road across his Colorado property was challenged by a plaintiff who was backed by off-road recreation interests.