Asteroid alert: How prepared are we for the next impact?
The Earth is bombarded daily with almost 100 tonnes of material from space, but most of it is no larger than a grain of dust. What happens when the size increases and it doesn't have time to burn up in the atmosphere? Dr Marchis, known as the "asteroid hunter," revealed what NASA doesn't officially say.
The Earth is under constant "bombardment" by asteroids. Not all of them can be located in time. A few days ago, one hit the Earth's atmosphere and exploded, turning into a fireball. This occurred in Siberia.
It was only 70 centimetres in diameter, so it did not pose a significant threat. What is much more shocking, according to Franck Marchis from the SETI Institute, is that the reaction time for those observing the sky was only... 7 hours GMT.
If it had been slightly bigger, that would been a very different story. [...] This shows that, if we want our civilization to last for a long period of time, we need to look around us and characterize those objects — he revealed to MailOnline.
The founder of the citizen astronomers' network made the issue clear. Such results are due to low budgets and too few personnel who are actively observing the sky. He added that despite comprehensive equipment, it is not properly distributed, and many places on the planet are still "dark zones."
Dr Marchis believes that an appropriate safeguard would be for NASA to purchase a larger number of cheap and less advanced telescopes, which could be used to monitor the situation from all over the planet. Users could even be amateur astronomers.
The novel solution was that, instead of having a handful of massive advanced systems, you could fill the dark zones with small, cheap telescopes to watch the whole sky at onces — he summarised to MailOnline.
Can an asteroid heading toward Earth be destroyed?
The "asteroid hunter" did not leave readers with a bleak vision of the future. He reminded us that it is important not only to locate the incoming material but also to effectively eliminate it.
In this matter, 2 years ago a breakthrough experiment occurred. During this time, a system was developed, within which NASA — if it knows about the asteroid well in advance — can destroy it. Therefore, it is important for more specialised individuals to continuously watch the sky.
