That’s the (rather unscientific) advice to Congress from NASA chief Charles Bolden, who basically says that if a large asteroid heads towards a big US city–as it recently did in Russia–there’s not much else we can do. He told them, "From the information we have, we don’t know of an asteroid that will threaten the population of the United States. But if it’s coming in three weeks, pray."
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Will life on Mars go the way of the dinosaurs before we have a chance to discover it? Incoming Comet C213/A1, discovered on January 1st, is expected by some astronomers to pass within 28,000 miles of Marsin 2014. But cometary trajectories change, and an impact is not impossible, although NASA estimates that the object will pass Mars at a distance more like 80,000 miles.
Should it hit the planet, it will cause a spectacular explosion, releasing the equivalent energy of billion megatons of TNT. This is roughly the size of the blast that climaxed the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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Asteroid impacts are rare, but they can cause incredible harm (look what one did to the dinosaurs!). In 1908, one of them flattened 800 square miles in the Russian countryside. What would have happened if it had hit a major Western city instead?
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On this week’s Dreamland, Andrew Collins talks about an ancient catastrophe that wiped out most of the life in North America 13,000 years ago. It could be the reason that why the Indians were so completely decimated by the Europeans when they arrived?because the continent, although lush, was relatively empty.
Two researchers have a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago. One indicator is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at some 50 Clovis-age sites in North America that date to the onset of a long cooling period.
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