Is NASA mindful of any Earth-threatening asteroids? Asteroid professional Davide Farnocchia of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory breaks it down:
Video Transcript:
Is NASA Aware of Any Earth-Threatening Asteroids? We Asked a NASA Scientist.
No, there is no asteroid that we understand of that is concerning in regards to effect threat.
Now, we know that asteroid impacts have taken place in the past and can definitely take place in the future. We must keep in mind that those are rare occasions.
An asteroid impact that could trigger severe regional damage just occurs every few thousand years or longer.
Still, its a good concept to safeguard us versus that possibility and the guideline of the video game is discover asteroids before they discover us.
And thats why for over 20 years, NASA has actually been moneying search programs to observe the sky quite much every single night to find and track asteroids.
And weve been doing a quite good job at that. So far, weve found more than a million asteroids, including 95 percent of the asteroids that are greater than one kilometer which could come close to the Earth.
We project its movement into the future to assess the possibility of an effect with Earth as soon as we find an asteroid.
We have a scale called Torino scale that assists us rank the danger originating from each asteroid. It goes from no, which is lowest threat, to 10, which is greatest threat.
And the bright side is that for all the asteroids that weve discovered up until now, the Torino scale is zero– so, most affordable threat for the next a century.
Is NASA mindful of any Earth-threatening asteroids?
No. We will keep browsing the skies simply in case.
We Asked a NASA Scientist.
Is NASA aware of any Earth-threatening asteroids? Fortunately there are no known asteroid dangers to Earth for at least 100 years. That does not imply were not looking. Asteroid specialist Davide Farnocchia of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory breaks it down: