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Asteroids pose a clear and present danger to Earth. There have been many asteroid strikes and space agencies are finding new space rocks all the time. So, will an asteroid strike Earth?
Did you know that space debris as small as grains of sand or pebbles in their thousands hit the Earth’s atmosphere every day? The atmosphere works as a shield, burning up these space rocks. But this is not the case every time. Sometimes, there are meteors in our night sky which burn up high in the atmosphere, but other times huge asteroids actually manage to strike the Earth. One such catastrophic incident happened around 66 million years ago, which is said to have killed off the entire species of dinosaurs. It is known as the Chicxulub event. The asteroid was 15-km wide and it hit the area known as Chicxulub, which is centred on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
However, this wasn’t the only asteroid strike in history, which had a devastating effect on Earth. In fact, another asteroid event in recent recorded history happened in 1908, when a 60-metre wide asteroid exploded near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Eastern Siberia, Russia. Known as the Tunguska event, it had flattened 2150 square kilometres of forests. Another asteroid strike on Earth was reported in Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013. It recorded a 20-metre wide asteroid exploding that damaged nearly 8000 buildings and hundreds of people were injured.
So, is Earth not safe from an asteroid strike?
“…we could always have an unexpected asteroid visiting us at some point without much warning. That, I think, is the biggest risk to Earth,” Aswin Sekhar, India’s first professional meteorologist, told Onmanorama.
The Indian scientist believes that there are still a lot of undiscovered objects in space which can make close approaches to Earth at any point of time. Scarily, he adds, “We don’t know whether any of them have a trajectory that can collide with the Earth.”
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