Threat to life will come from space
Over its more than four billion-year history, the Earth has repeatedly collided with asteroids and other celestial bodies. The consequences of such collisions were very different: from a small wave at the place of falling into the sea to the destruction of all life on the planet. Such clashes cannot be avoided, but when the next will happen, no one knows. Therefore, now it is necessary to learn how to predict such collisions in order to intercept uninvited guests at a distance from our planet.
"Sooner or later there will be a major or minor collision," Rolf Densing, director of the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, quoted phys.org.
Densing said these words on the eve of International Asteroid Day, which will be celebrated on Friday. Such a collision may occur in several tens or hundreds of years, but the likelihood of a collision with catastrophic consequences, he said, is very high. It is so high and the risk of a catastrophe of a planetary scale is so high that more and more scientists now consider collisions with celestial bodies, primarily asteroids, to be the main challenge facing humanity in the 21st century.
Despite the danger, the first attempt to try to meet the asteroid fully armed and, say, change its trajectory so that it does not collide with the Earth, failed. European ministers in December 2016 decided not to fund the project.
There have been many ways to change the trajectory of the asteroid or to blow it up, but everyone understands that first it must be noticed in time.
Collisions of the Earth with large asteroids, the size of which reaches 10 kilometers, occur on average every one hundred million years. The next meeting with such a heavenly "hippopotamus" may well become a death sentence for humanity.
Given the relative rarity of encounters with such huge asteroids, scientists argue that average asteroids between 15 and 140 meters in size, which are counted in the millions, are much more dangerous. By the way, the size of the Tunguska meteorite was 40 meters. It was on the day it fell to Earth - June 30, 1908, that Asteroid Day is celebrated. Collisions with such asteroids occur approximately every 300 years.
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ZAKHAR RADOV