Before Life Could Evolve on our Planet, We Had to Get Hit by Asteroids a Couple Times The early days of the solar system were a time of significant tumult. Our solar system began as a diffuse cloud of gas and dust slowly coalescing. Over time, the unerring pull of gravity formed those...
For decades, researchers have proposed ways to protect Earth from asteroid impacts. In 2022, NASA's DART mission will test one such method: using a kinetic impactor to push a small asteroid off course.
Specifically, they estimate that approximately 70 dinosaur-killer-size or larger impacts hit the Earth over a span that lasted between 3.8 and 1.8 billion years ago, with four also hitting the moon. The frequency of these impacts was high enough to reproduce the known spherule beds, and also ...
The asteroid is never expected to hitrnEarth and would burn up before hitting the ground in any case. But its unusual orbit (see diagram) seems ingeniously designed to evade our surveys. It is likely that a handful of objects large enough to cause harm are hiding under similar circumstances...
Administration to NASA: Defend Earth from Asteroids, Please Apophis was just the beginning. There could be as many as a million space rocks near enough to hit the Earth—and, in some cases, take out major population centers. Where's the asteroid czar who will finally mount a cohesive planet...
On Saturday, an asteroid the size of one and a half football fields flew within 240,000 miles (386,000 kilometers) of Earth. If the space rock had hit land, it would have leveled an area the size of San Francisco Bay. If it had hit the Pacific Ocean, the impact would have sent ...
The subject of Hollywood movies, the reality of asteroid and comet strikes is more science, than science fiction. Most researchers believe the likelihood of a massive object colliding with Earth in our lifetime is small, but the planet has been hit before and will certainly be hit again. ...
The debris could hit Mars. Science NASA smashed an asteroid. The debris could hit Mars. Read An asteroid may have turned ancient Earth into a snowball Science An asteroid may have turned ancient Earth into a snowball Read Is there a 9th planet out there? We may soon find out. Science Is...
Deflecting the asteroid is the hard part, though the physics is pretty simple. The idea is to nudge the asteroid and change its orbit by a tiny amount. It would typically hit the Earth at around 30 km/s, though this would depend on whether it came in sideways, head-on or from behind...
Dinosaurs and Asteroids. 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs (and many other groups of organisms) went extinct. This mass extinction may have ben caused by an asteroid hitting the earth.