NASA has now completed its congress mandate to find 90 per cent of all the humanity killing asteroids near Earth. Their catalogue covers 93 per cent of all of these objects, which are so big that they would cause catastrophic damage on impact.
NASA’s Amy Mainzer, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California, presented the findings of the Spaceguard project at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. In addition to these 1000 rocks that are 1km in diameter or larger, Spaceguard has located 20,500 smaller asteroids also near Earth.
The chances of these asteroids hitting us any time soon is very low, however. According to Mainzer, it’s a “not a very likely event”.
That’s great news.
Now, where the hell are all the killing asteroids in the 7 per cent? [Reuters]
Matt
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 12:49 PM“According to Mainzer, it’s a “not a very likely event”.”
Should be;
“According to Mainzer, it’s “not a very likely event”.”
DNA
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:00 PMAhhhh, thanks for that clarification. It all makes sense now.
light487
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:22 PMYay for NASA and the US Congress for instilling fear in us all :) hehehhe
Ammusionist
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:45 PMUm… How do they know if they’ve found 93% unless they’ve found all of them?
Jo
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:51 PMI suspect they mean the current locations of 93% of all the asteroids they know about.
LGB
Monday, December 12, 2011 at 5:53 PMActually that reads as they catalogued only 93% of the 90% that they found.
Also how do you only look for 90% of an unknown amount?
And 10% is potentially still a lot of freaking rocks unaccounted for..
I would then have to say at best Mainzer’s assessment is a platitude…
All sounds a bit half arsed to me…
Phil
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 2:42 PMThis can only be a good thing. No one wants to be wiped out by an unseen asteroid. The next step is to figure out what we should do if we DO find a potentially dangerous object
Ghazarios
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 5:15 PMThat video was crazy, apparently that’s happened 6 times in Earth’s history? How would any sort of life form survive that.
Also, Australia didn’t look too bad, even though it was just under the impact area.
DarthDVD
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 9:03 PMSo thats how the USA is going to take on china. Orbital Strike!