Are Asteroids Humanity's 'Greatest Challenge'?

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.
But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.
"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.
It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."
For now, there is little we can do.
And yet, the first-ever mission to crash a probe into a small space rock to alter its trajectory suffered a major setback when European ministers declined in December to fund part of the project.
"We are not ready to defend ourselves" against an Earth-bound object, said Densing. "We have no active planetary defence measures."
Hitherto relegated to the realms of science fiction, tactics could include nuking an incoming asteroid, using lasers to vaporise it, sending a space "tractor" to drag it off course, or bumping it into a new direction.
But first, we need to be able to spot the threat.
Astrophysicists monitoring the risk classify objects into sizes ranging from a few millimetres to behemoths 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across—the size of rock that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
The smallest type enter Earth's atmosphere daily, burning up prettily as shooting stars.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-asteroids-humanity-greatest.html#jCp

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.
But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.
"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.
It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."
For now, there is little we can do.
And yet, the first-ever mission to crash a probe into a small space rock to alter its trajectory suffered a major setback when European ministers declined in December to fund part of the project.
"We are not ready to defend ourselves" against an Earth-bound object, said Densing. "We have no active planetary defence measures."
Hitherto relegated to the realms of science fiction, tactics could include nuking an incoming asteroid, using lasers to vaporise it, sending a space "tractor" to drag it off course, or bumping it into a new direction.
But first, we need to be able to spot the threat.
Astrophysicists monitoring the risk classify objects into sizes ranging from a few millimetres to behemoths 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across—the size of rock that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
The smallest type enter Earth's atmosphere daily, burning up prettily as shooting stars.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-asteroids-humanity-greatest.html#jCp

Getty Images

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation. 

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows. 

But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.

"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.

It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."

For now, there is little we can do.

And yet, the first-ever mission to crash a probe into a small space rock to alter its trajectory suffered a major setback when European ministers declined in December to fund part of the project.

"We are not ready to defend ourselves" against an Earth-bound object, said Densing. "We have no active planetary defence measures." 

Hitherto relegated to the realms of science fiction, tactics could include nuking an incoming asteroid, using lasers to vaporise it, sending a space "tractor" to drag it off course, or bumping it into a new direction.

But first, we need to be able to spot the threat.

Astrophysicists monitoring the risk classify objects into sizes ranging from a few millimetres to behemoths 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across—the size of rock that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

The smallest type enter Earth's atmosphere daily, burning up prettily as shooting stars.

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.
But the pressure is on to predict—and intercept—its arrival.
"Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact," Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.
It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but "the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high."
For now, there is little we can do.
And yet, the first-ever mission to crash a probe into a small space rock to alter its trajectory suffered a major setback when European ministers declined in December to fund part of the project.
"We are not ready to defend ourselves" against an Earth-bound object, said Densing. "We have no active planetary defence measures."
Hitherto relegated to the realms of science fiction, tactics could include nuking an incoming asteroid, using lasers to vaporise it, sending a space "tractor" to drag it off course, or bumping it into a new direction.
But first, we need to be able to spot the threat.
Astrophysicists monitoring the risk classify objects into sizes ranging from a few millimetres to behemoths 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) across—the size of rock that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.
The smallest type enter Earth's atmosphere daily, burning up prettily as shooting stars.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-asteroids-humanity-greatest.html#jCp

Read the rest here:
Are asteroids humanity's 'greatest challenge'?