The risk of an asteroid hitting Earth is higher than you think. According to NASA, at least five asteroids are detected heading towards our planet every night. Thankfully, NASA has developed programs that will detect incoming asteroids and alert us in case of a potential direct hit of an incoming asteroid.
NASA's Scout is a program being tested and developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Its main objective is to constantly scan telescopic data to see if there are Near Earth Objects (asteroids or any space objects heading towards or near our planet). The Scout program then calculates the size and how far the incoming object is to Earth. Scout's other objective is to speed up the process of the calculations.
According to Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomers, it's still finding five more asteroids every night to the already 15,000 NEOs cataloged by NASA. Scout is primarily focused on 140-meter NEOs or less. Asteroids bigger than 140 meters are under the jurisdiction of another NASA program called Sentry.
Just like Scout, Sentry also monitors and calculates telescopic data for NEOs that could possibly wide out an entire city should it hit the Earth. And if ever NEOs are calculated to really hit our planet, NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office is prepared for that.
The Planetary Defense Coordination Office's primary role is to prepare for asteroid impacts. It has prepared plans for emergency situations in an aftermath of a possible asteroid impact. In a recent survey, the Scout program was able to detect an incoming asteroid and has calculated that the approaching NEO will hit the Earth in five days.
Thankfully, the NEO in question missed our planet by 315,000 miles but is Scout's calculation of five days enough for the world to prepare for an asteroid impact? NASA thinks five days is enough to execute emergency procedures and coordinate evacuations of a possible asteroid hit area.
But don't worry; NASA is actively developing another program that aims to shift an asteroid's trajectory so it won't hit our planet. NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission already has a robot prototype that will attach its self to the incoming asteroid and propel it away from the Earth. It sounds like any other scene from a sci-fi movie but with NASA preparing for the inevitable, it seems that the likelihood of an asteroid hitting our planet is quite high.
What do you think? Will we likely be living the scenes of the movie, "Armageddon" or will we experience an asteroid impact that led to the extinction of dinosaurs?
