The Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia has assessed the risks of a collision of the Earth with asteroids until 2050
According to the Emergencies Ministry, the first potentially dangerous approach of the Earth with a large asteroid will take place on October 12, 2017. It will be asteroid 2012TS4, which will pass at a distance of 115 thousand kilometers from our planet at a speed of 6.8 kilometers per second. The diameter of this celestial body is 17 meters.
“Until 2050, 11 encounters with asteroids are predicted to distances less than the average radius of the lunar orbit (385 thousand kilometers). The sizes of these objects are in the range from seven to 945 meters, "- says the forecast of the Center" Antistikha "of the Russian Emergencies Ministry.
The most potentially dangerous asteroid is Apofes (99942 Apophis), which has a diameter of 393 meters. On April 13, 2029, it will approach the Earth at a distance of 38.4 thousand kilometers, which is close to the altitude of the orbits of geostationary satellites (35.8 thousand kilometers). The rendezvous speed will be 7.42 kilometers per second.
At the same time, as stated in the forecast of the Antistikhia center of the EMERCOM of Russia, “in 2016, no dangerous encounters with large asteroids are predicted”. Note that large space objects include asteroids with a diameter of more than a kilometer. There are about 120 very large asteroid craters on Earth, in Russia the largest of them is the Popigai depression in the north of the Siberian platform. The dimensions of the inner crater are 75 kilometers, the outer one is 100 kilometers; the catastrophe occurred about 36 million years ago.
Comparatively smaller objects also pose a serious threat to the Earth, since their explosions near populated areas as a result of shock waves and heating can lead to significant destruction, commensurate with damage from an atomic explosion. Only by chance, the fall into an uninhabited area of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 did not cause such consequences.