World leaders are purposely keeping quiet on this matter, all in fear of chaos that would ensue and that would take millions of lives! The last time that meteor struck our planet was four years ago when a small asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere above Russia taking a toll of 1,200 injured people!
Two months ago there was a rumor of asteroid hitting the Earth on July 23rd. According to that story, the impact site should have been Puerto Rico, and the author claimed that every government had information about this but kept quiet on purpose. This rumor proved to be false, we are alive and well but that doesn’t mean that we have nothing to fear in future.
As the time passes by, the probability of an asteroid hitting the Earth is getting higher and higher according to scientists.
We have already mentioned that the last occurrence of this kind was four years ago in Russia when an asteroid struck Earth at a speed of 18km/s (64,800 km/h). It exploded just above Chelyabinsk and injured around 1,200 people.
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons from the University of Belfast claimed that we are aware of approximately 90% of asteroids that orbit around the Earth and could one day, potentially, hit us. However, he added that millions go under our radar and eventually because of that fact we could suffer devastating catastrophes.
He stated this publicly few days before the Asteroid Day (June 30). The source at hand is foxnews.com.
‘Asteroids in vicinity of our planet are being discovered on daily basis and most of them are harmless. Even though we are quite good at discovering them, that won’t help us if we don’t prepare ourselves in good time to act!’ claimed Fitzsimmons.
Of course, the NASA monitors everything, but Dr. Joseph Nut of Goddard Space Flight Center emphasized that we are relatively unprepared for a potential strike. Even though they are rare, dangerous asteroids and other kinds of space debris usually enter our atmosphere every 50 to 60 millions of years.
‘History could repeat itself, we have to be cautious. Still, I think that time is our friend here, we had some major advancements in this field of study and we have tremendous technology at our disposal. This could be a game of wits, something could strike our Earth as soon as tomorrow or the day after tomorrow’ said Fitzsimmons.
Tracking and monitoring asteroids is especially difficult and demanding a job since the asteroids reflect only 10 to 15% of sunshine and telescopes from the Earth have a difficult task ahead to find every potential threat in these asteroids that roam vast desert that space is!
In order to discover a potential object, these telescopes have to capture a string of photos of the same spatial unit in bursts that last a few minutes.
Therefore, the NASA is aware of more than 730,000 asteroids, but out of them all only 16,000 are in the vicinity of the Earth and out of those only 1,784 present a potential threat. On the NASA’s web page everyone can track them and see what asteroids could come near our planet and when.
