Sunday, March 10, 2013

Will more asteroids collide with Earth in the near future?

Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust travel to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and ice-balls streak through our atmosphere daily, most evaporating quickly to nothing. Significant threats do exist for rocks near 100 meters in diameter, which strike the Earth roughly every 1000 years. An object this size could cause significant tsunamis were it to strike an ocean, potentially devastating even distant shores. A collision with a massive asteroid, over 1 km across, is more rare, occurring typically millions of years apart, but could have truly global consequences. Many asteroids remain undiscovered.

 Charles Bolden, the chief of the Nasa, has warned that the US space agency's best advice on how to handle a large asteroid heading towards New York City is

1 comment:

  1. This is an interesting movement working on this problem: http://b612foundation.org/

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