Hi steemians! Today I want to share about Asteroid Potentially Hitting the Earth Difficult to Detect.
The earth we inhabit is one of the easy targets for asteroids and comets. But before they touch the Earth, most of them burn at an altitude of tens of kilometres. Even so, there are some of those larger in size that can escape the Earth's length. This once happened off the east coast of Russia on December 18, 2018. A giant explosion occurred above the Bering Sea when an asteroid with a circumference of about ten meters exploded. The energy of the explosion was ten times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Of course, the question for us is how do we detect this asteroid coming? How do we only hear about the collision that exploded at this time? If the explosion happened close to us we might hear about it when the explosion occurred. But because it happened in a remote area that was unknown to many people for more than three months. The incident was only known after it was announced at the 50th Conference on Moon and Planet Science this week. This report is known based on the results of fireball data collection conducted by NASA so that it attracts people's attention.
As is well known that our solar system is filled with waste material from the formation of planets. Most of the remaining material is locked in the Asteroid belt. This belt is the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud whose position is far from Earth. Space objects often escape from these belts so that they can cause new debris to enter into an orbit across the planets. Our solar system on the inside is filled with debris. For example, small dust spots, even comets and asteroids with a diameter of several kilometres, fill our inner solar system.
The majority of the debris that collides with the Earth is completely harmless. But our planet still has a hit scar with celestial bodies of much larger size. Of course, the rare and the biggest and most powerful occurred 65 million years ago and killed dinosaurs. Note that smaller, more frequent collisions are also very risky.
For example in 1908 a large explosion levelled more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest in Siberia. As a result of its remote location, there were no fatalities. Maybe if it happened just two hours later then the city of Saint Petersburg, Russia could have been destroyed. Another example is in 2013 where an asteroid of 10,000 tons exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. It is estimated that more than 1,500 people were injured and around 7,000 buildings were damaged. Nevertheless, there were no fatalities.
Learning from the case, over the past few decades, joint efforts have been made to look for potentially dangerous objects that can hit Earth. It was found that the identification of thousands of asteroids near the Earth with a height of several meters. Once found, the orbits of these objects can be determined. The pathway is then predicted to know the impact of the collision is possible or not.
But these efforts have not been successful. Catalogue of potentially dangerous objects continues to grow even though many have not been detected. If we are able to project a collision in the next few days, we will be able to know where and when a collision will occur. That happened for the first time in 2008 when astronomers discovered a small TC3 2008 asteroid. Where after 19 hours before the asteroid hit Earth's atmosphere above northern Sudan.
Collisions that can be predicted with a longer waiting time. We will be able to find out whether the object is really dangerous. Or it might produce spectacular but harmless fireballs (like TC3). Celestial bodies that are able to pose a threat, of course, we will be competing to make the asteroid not hit the earth.