Group items tagged

A 2013 meteor explosion above Chelyabinsk, Russia injured more than 1,700 people. It was completely unexpected -- and it could happen again. Here's what NASA's doing to make sure we know how to act when (not if) the next one hits.

"Enter the planetary defenders, a group of astronomers, physicists and aerospace engineers who have since the early 1990s been locating flying space rocks, painstakingly plotting their orbits, and thinking of ingenious schemes to drag them off course or blow them up should they be on a trajectory toward us. Finally, they have been imagining how the fractious family of man might come together with a contingency plan to literally save the planet, like Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Hollywood's Armageddon. NASA has identified 94% of the huge, potentially civilization-ending asteroids nearby (none of which is on an earth-trajectory for now). But only about 1 percent of the 500,000 Near Earth Objects around the size of 2012 DA14 orbiting near earth's orbit have been tracked. The space agency's global Spaceguard program connects professional and amateur telescopes looking for smaller NEOs. A telescope in Spain picked 2012 DA14 when it was 2.7 million miles away, and reported it to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge. Later,scientists calculated its trajectory, based on a few plot points of its movement."

"Alright people, let's move on. Nothing to see here. You know that asteroid of death that whizzed by Earth today at an altitude that's actually below some of our satellites? You know that meteor that exploded in the skies over Russia today, injuring nearly 1,000 people? And you know all that speculation that they're somehow connected-that the Earth has stumbled into some kind of storm-front of space rocks, any one of which will annihilate us eventually? Forget it. The two incidents have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and neither one should cause us all that much worry. Yet."

One of the rarest and most exciting events in space exploration is when we land on another celestial body and achieve a boots-on-the-ground view of an alien world. Europe's Rosetta mission is now poised to add another extraterrestrial landfall to that very short list, and top a new list as it becomes the first mission to land a probe on a comet.