![]() Any change in the smaller object’s orbit will be easy to measure from Earth and will provide a good indicator of whether it has been successfully deflected. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will slam a spacecraft into the smaller of two asteroids orbiting each other. That’s why NASA is launching a spacecraft next year to conduct the first test of one promising strategy for stopping a killer asteroid: Hit it while it’s still far enough way to alter its course. If humans are still around when that day comes, it would be prudent to have a plan for protecting the planet. On average, one or two space rocks large enough to cataclysmically impact a continent pass by each year.Įarth will almost certainly confront a space rock large enough to obliterate a city, or worse, at some point in its future. Every year, dozens of asteroids that are big enough to cause regional devastation pass within five million miles of Earth-the cutoff for potentially hazardous asteroids. “It’s smaller than the thing thought to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but it is easily capable of causing a lot of damage.”Īn asteroid passing relatively close to Earth is more common than most people realize. “It’s just a whopping big asteroid,” says Amy Mainzer of the University of Arizona, one of the planet’s leading scientists in asteroid detection and planetary defense. The object, called 1998 OR2, is at least a mile wide, and while it poses no threat, it will pass within four million miles of our planet-close enough to be classified by NASA as “potentially hazardous,” because it will continue to make close passes to Earth in the future as both objects orbit the sun. ![]() An enormous asteroid-big enough to leave a six-mile-wide crater and darken the world with dust if it hit Earth-will harmlessly zip by our planet on April 29.
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