A shocking report on asteroid threats... and NASA is preparing to prevent the catastrophe!
The threat posed by uncontrollable asteroids is very real, said famed astronomer Martin Rees, and NASA's Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) may prove to be Earth's last line of defense from potential global catastrophe.
According to a shocking report published by the British newspaper "Express", catastrophic asteroid collisions with Earth have occurred in the past, and there are possibilities of their occurrence again in the invisible future, including when a space rock six miles (10 km) wide struck the planet off the coast of the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula before About 66 million years ago, the chain reaction resulting from the collision led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
More recently, during 2013, a 65.5-foot (20-meter) wide boulder entered Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and exploded before it reached the ground, causing an atmospheric explosion that destroyed windows, damaged buildings, and injured more than 1,500 people by cutting glass. .
Five years after the accident, NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson described the Chelyabinsk meteor as a "cosmic wake-up call to the dangers lurking in the depths of space," so it's not surprising to see the US space agency step up efforts to bolster its defenses for our planet.
Late last month, NASA launched the asteroid redirection test (DART), which has been described as a last-ditch attempt to prove that the planet is not completely defenseless against threats, especially since scientists previously indicated that attempts to detonate an asteroid heading towards Earth could have dire consequences.
Instead, NASA has proposed using a so-called kinetic collider, which can use minimal effort to alter the orbital path of an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth rather than trying to blow it up. DART was set to rendezvous with a pair of near-Earth asteroids called Didymos (65803) in late Next year, this should change the asteroid's orbit by a fraction of a percentage.
According to Lord Martin Rees, a famous British cosmologist and astrophysicist, this will depend to some extent on the asteroid's surface and the amount of debris the collision causes, but even a small change over long distances can be enough to steer a rogue asteroid away from Earth.
"If we know the orbits well enough to have several years of advance warning, we will only need a small push to get them out," he told Express.
Didymos asteroids do not pose any direct threat to the planet, but they represent a class of asteroids that orbit the sun within close proximity to the planet, and this gives astronomers ample reason to want to observe space.
Lord Rees said: “Astronomers have identified most of the large asteroids that can cause global catastrophes, but it is useful to plot the orbits of all trans-Earths more than 50 meters in diameter, which can destroy an entire city.
In the Tunguska disaster of 1908, an asteroid impact likely destroyed hundreds of square miles of Siberian forests and was for many years a source of intense debate among scientists, today asteroids are considered dangerous to Earth if they measure about 500 feet (150 meters) or more, and come close to orbit Earth is within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million km).
Lord Rees said: "The threat from asteroid collisions is of course real and I think what NASA is doing is worthwhile and proportionate, but the potential for impact is small and we should be much less concerned about the increasing threats that we humans cause to climate change."
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