Can We Protect the Planet From an Asteroid Speeding Towards It?

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Experts in planetary defense are developing ways to protect the planet from asteroids, large or small. Click the link to read more.

The most famous asteroid to collide with Earth is the Chicxulub crater, which hit the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago. It’s known for wiping out the dinosaurs, along with three quarters of life on the planet. Other huge craters like the Vredefort crater in South Africa and the Sudbury Basin in Ontario, Canada were even larger and likely barreled toward us a couple billion years ago.

But what will happen when an enormous object is speeding towards us? Will we know about it ahead of time and will we be able to defend ourselves?According to Chabot, scientists are already tracking around 90 percent of the larger asteroids , using Earth-based telescopes that take multiple pictures over several nights. They then lay out their orbit. Once we track asteroids, we can know where they are for decades or even a century. None of these are currently a threat.

NASA’s next big venture in planetary defense, is putting a telescope in space that’s “good at finding asteroids,” she says. This would be an IR telescope, or infrared telescope, that could detect infrared radiation and find these smaller, darker objects hidden deep in the night sky.

 

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