A century ago, an event in far-off Siberia gave us a wake-up call. That explosive event over remote Tunguska is generally viewed by scientists as a large space rock that pierced through the atmosphere of Siberia, then detonated to flatten some 2,000 square kilometers of trees. Could modern technology stop such an event from happening today?perhaps in a crowded city?
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The evidence is on the ocean floor – Asteroid impacts, like the one that did in the dinosaurs, are not as rare as we’d like to think they are. 70% of the earth is covered in water, so most asteroids land in the ocean. A researcher who searched for underwater impact craters and found an ominous number of them?several of them very recent, in geologic terms. And a huge meteorite found in Australia 40 years ago has been reanalyzed and now scientists think it may have brought life, in the form of bacteria, to this planet (Australia DOES have some of the world’s oldest?and most unique?life forms).
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Is NASA keeping the danger of a potential impact secret? – A 13-year-old German boy working on a science project recently corrected NASA’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth. He figured out that there is a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will hit us, while NASA claims that the odds are only 1 in 45,000.
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UPDATE – An asteroid passed by close to the earth in a near miss. One day, we may be directly in the path of an upcoming space rock. This one missed us, but we are STILL in the path of a falling spy satellite!
BBC News reports that a 600-foot-wide asteroid passed by the earth without hitting us. It swept by just outside the moon’s orbit.
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