Foreign media: Millions of asteroids or straight to Earth?

According to the Economic News Network of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 5, the planet hitting the earth is not just a science fiction movie plot. In fact, there is evidence that asteroids ever hit Earth to alter life, for example by causing the extinction of the dinosaurs.

According to the report, this is the first time that human beings have moved their true character to seek to rewrite the irreparable destruction that space boulders may cause when they hit the earth.

Last week, nasa launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft. It will be the world's first mission in space to strike an asteroid and validate active planetary defense technologies. According to the plan, DART will crash into a "dual-form" asteroid in October 2022, changing its orbital period. The star is orbiting a larger "twin" asteroid in a binary asteroid system. The two are about 11 million kilometers from Earth.

As of now, NASA has reported that no asteroid would crash into our planet. NASA also confirmed that of the 750,000 asteroids visible in the solar system, 27,000 have been determined to be orbiting "close" to Earth, of which about 10,000 are quite dangerous in volume. Beyond that, there are millions of asteroids that could veer off course and come straight for us. The steady increase in the number of near-Earth asteroids screened is perhaps the greatest news for predicting the likely impact of asteroids on the blue planet.

But for planetary defense experts, investigation alone is not enough, follow-up observations are crucial in order to provide scientists with the data they need to accurately calculate the orbit of an object. Kelly Fast, head of NASA's NEAR-Earth Object Observation Program, said: "That's the key. You want to know where the asteroid is now, but what you really want to know is where it will be in the future and whether Earth will appear in the same position at the same time. ”

If an asteroid is observed above a certain brightness (which indicates a certain size, although the two factors are not precisely related) and enters a distance of 7.48 million kilometers from Earth (this distance is one-twentieth of the average distance between Earth and the Sun), then the object is automatically referred to as a "potentially dangerous asteroid" by the report.

Scientists believe they have found almost all of the larger asteroids, i.e. those over 1 km in diameter, and know that they are the easiest to find. Although tiny near-Earth asteroids are numerous and difficult to spot, they are also most likely to burn up in Earth's atmosphere before impact. Therefore, planetary defense experts are most concerned about the medium-sized asteroid category, that is, those that are greater than 140 meters in diameter but less than 1 kilometer in diameter. "That's the area most likely to have an impact." Fast said.

It is estimated that by the end of 2020, scientists have only discovered 40% of necrospheres of this size; another 500 have been added this year. While the numbers are staggering, NASA's Office of Planetary Defense Coordination estimates that at the current rate, scientists will need another 30 years to identify 90 percent of objects of this size. The U.S. Congress has asked NASA to achieve this goal by 2020.

Source: Reference News Network