Bob's Blog

If an asteroid presented a real threat to Earth, would we find a way to deflect it? In the Daily Mail, Michael Thomsen reports,

A team of scientists at MIT have developed a computer program that will help humans decide how to best deal with the end of the world, so long as that comes in form of a catastrophic asteroid collision.

Experts say there as many as two or three new asteroids, sometimes called 'Near Earth Objects,' discovered every night.

It’s inevitable that one of these asteroids will eventually end drifting into a collision course with Earth.



A team of scientists from MIT have developed a new computer program to help simulate all the possible approaches to dealing with an asteroid on a trajectory for Earth

Read more here.

The Guardian reports that

Asteroids caused 26 nuclear-scale explosions in the Earth's atmosphere between 2000 and 2013, a new report reveals.

Some were more powerful – in one case, dozens of times stronger – than the atom bomb blast that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 with an energy yield equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT.

Most occurred too high in the atmosphere to cause any serious damage on the ground. But the evidence was a sobering reminder of how vulnerable the Earth was to the threat from space, scientists said.

The impacts were recorded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation, which operates a global network of sensors set up to detect nuclear weapon detonations. None of the asteroids were picked up or tracked in advance by any space- or Earth-based observatory.

Read more here.