While space debris is a common guest to our planet, with small rocks burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere every day, potential impacts of larger asteroids can lead to more dire consequences.
It looks like we can all relax for now, as NASA has revealed that the likelihood of a gigantic asteroid 5 to 10 kilometres in diameter hitting the Earth is only 0.000001%, the outlet Interesting Engineering reported, citing the space agency’s data.
These kinds of space rock, which cause the type of impact that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs millions of years ago, hits our planet every 50 to 60 million years, scientists say. However, NASA reportedly stated that smaller asteroids, albeit still large enough to wipe out entire cities, are much more likely to strike our planet in the future, with the probability of such an event happening this year being 0.1%. If a rock of that size enters our atmosphere, there is a 70% chance that it will land in the ocean, according to the agency.
NASA is currently running the Near-Earth-Asteroids (NEAs) monitoring programme, known as Sentry, which compiles a risk table indicating the impact probability of rocks flying close to Earth.
No objects in the table are currently deemed large or dangerous enough to threaten life on our planet in the near future, but some close approaches might still have been overlooked by astronomers. Just last year, a football field-size asteroid dubbed “2019 OK” which, came within 65,000km of Earth’s surface, was spotted by astronomers only a day before flying by our planet, thus taking scientist completely by surprise.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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