Far out cosmology: fighting off asteroid hits (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 05, 2024, 22:29 (16 days ago) @ David Turell

We have detected many more:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQXKWkpMLZFMXTdkJFfZbJhhLjz

"In 2013, an asteroid exploded just 15 miles above Earth’s surface, creating a huge fireball that briefly outshone the sun in the sky. The resulting shock wave shattered windows in the nearest town, more than 40 miles away in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The impactor had escaped detection by astronomers.

"What's new: Since the 2013 impact, scientists have discovered an additional 200,000 near-Earth asteroids, more than had been found in all of history up to 2013. In 2022 NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) slammed a spacecraft into a small asteroid and slowed its orbit by about a half hour, successfully altering the cosmic body’s trajectory.

"The future: The Chelyabinsk asteroid took us by surprise but it won’t be the last, writes Phil Plait, astronomer and science communicator. Bigger impactors are rare, but we’re sharpening our detectors and tools to be able to deal with them. In fact, “thanks to new projects such as NEO Surveyor and the Vera Rubin Observatory, within a decade or two we’ll have found upward of 90 percent of the asteroids that may threaten Earth in the next hundred years,” says science journalist Robin George Andrews, who this year published a new book, How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense."

Comment: the Chixculub asteroid demonstrated how dangerous they are. If we are on our way to 90% detection, we are in good shape to protect ourselves. dhw will ask why God allowed this menace. The answer is our planet came from accretion of many planetoid bodies like the asteroids. Earth would not exist without them. Then dhw will ask why God did not do it differently for safety. Perhaps by some other method. The possibility is there is no other method, but dhw continuously knows better than God.