CLAIM OF FACT

The possiblity of an asteroid or meteor of hittimg the earth is great enough that the federal
government should be finding plans to prevent it.

MY OPINION

Nobody can cay if there is really a high possibility of an asteroid or meteor of hitting our
planet.But we must rely on the previous research of expert astronomers. According to them there
is really high chances of a collision of asteroid because there are infinite numbers of asteroids
and meteors on the space. But astronomers said that if there a possible collision of an asteroid in
our planet they will already detects it a long time before it happen so we can make a possible
protection to prevent it from happening.

IS THERE A HIGH POSSIBILITY?

Two statisticians put into perspective the chances of asteroid Bennu

striking Earth in next 300 years
Even Harry Stamper would probably like these odds.

Recently NASA updated its forecast of the chances that the asteroid Bennu, one of the two most
hazardous known objects in our solar system, will hit Earth in the next 300 years. New
calculations put the odds at 1 in 1,750, a figure slightly higher than previously thought.

The space agency, which has been tracking the building-sized rock since it was discovered in
1999, revised its prediction based on new tracking data.

Even with the small shift in odds, it seems likely we won’t face the kind of scenario featured that
in the 1998 science-fiction disaster film “Armageddon” when Stamper, played by Bruce Willis,
and his team had to try to blow up a huge asteroid that was on an extinction-making collision
course with the Earth.

(In an unrelated development, NASA plans to launch a mission in November to see whether a
spacecraft could hit a sizeable space rock and change its trajectory just in case it ever needs to.)

This begs the question of just how good should we feel about our odds? We put that question
to Lucas B. Janson and Morgane Austern, both assistant professors of statistics.

They compared Bennu’s chances of hitting Earth to the approximate likelihood of:

o Flipping a coin and having the first 11 attempts all land heads.
o Any four random people sharing a birthday in the same month (the odds of this are 1 in
1,750 exactly).
o Throwing a dart at a dartboard with your eyes closed and hitting a bullseye.
o Winning the state’s VaxMillions lottery on two separate days if every eligible adult
resident is entered and a new drawing is held every second.

Bottom line? Janson, an affiliate in computer science, says that if he were a betting man, he
would put his money on our being just fine. Then again, he points out, if he is wrong, “Paying up
would be the least of my worries.”1

1
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/08/statisticians-put-odds-of-bennu-hitting-earth-into-perspective/
Writer: Juan Siliezer (Harvard Staff Writer
Credits: Harvard News
Nasa
Can we spot a killer asteroid before it hits Earth?
For five long days, a team of meteorite hunters had tussled with thorn bushes and trudged
through thick grass in the middle of Botswana. They knew roughly where they should be looking
– within a 200 sq km area – but the fragment was likely tiny. Who knows if it had been buried,
or even blown away by the wind.

And then. There it was, a tiny chunk of black, dusty stone that came from outer space. About a
month earlier, a team of astronomers had predicted in what part of the world meteorites from a
particular asteroid would fall. That asteroid, named 2018 LA, exploded in the night-time sky in
Botswana several hours after it was seen hurtling towards our plant.

Finding the fragment proved the astronomers right – and it was only the second time in history
that fragments of a meteorite had been found from an asteroid previously observed in space.

One of the teams that contributed to this fantastic find is hoping that their system of telescopes
can one day warn people on Earth in advance of a bigger, potentially fatal, impact. But how will
they do it?

While still in space, 2018 LA was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey, a Nasa-funded

project. But it was then also observed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System
(Atlas) at the University of Hawaii.
Atlas is a system of telescopes that has been designed with one ultimate goal in mind: save
earthlings from giant space rocks.

It was set up by John Tonry, an astronomer. He was inspired to start the project years ago after
constantly hearing that the chances of a dangerous asteroid hitting Earth were very low – once
every millennium or so.

“It really bugged me that that number was always handed out without any uncertainty and the
actual, most recent event of that type was only 100 years ago,” he explains.

Tonry is referring to the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia, in which an asteroid exploded in the

atmosphere, creating a 50-100m wide fireball and flattening about 80 million trees. Reportedly,
one person died in the incident. Had the impact site been a more populated area, the effects
would have been horrific.

Atlas consists of two telescopes in Hawaii, though Tonry is currently working with colleagues on
setting up a third in South Africa, to observe the sky in the southern hemisphere. A fourth
telescope has also been funded. Once the full system gets going, Tonry hopes it will offer us a
good chance of spotting a major potential impact and, if needs be, it could provide enough notice
to evacuate the predicted impact site.

Thanks to this summer’s fragment discovery in Botswana, we know Atlas can get it right. And
pinpointing the landing place of 2018 LA was all the more impressive since it was such a small
asteroid, less than 2m across.“It’s a very good initiative, the Atlas system”
says Clemens Rumpf, a visiting researcher at the University of Southampton who specialises in
the study of asteroids.
“Even today we miss a lot of asteroids that are
potentially dangerous”
Clemens Rumpf VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

The space around Earth is full of rocks. Atlas’s job is to pick out the ones that might threaten us.
Tonry explains that in a single night of observations, he and his team might detect about a
million objects. A lot of those will be stars or exploding stars (supernovae), or known asteroids
on safe trajectories. There might be just ten or twenty that are new to us, and not necessarily any
that are dangerous.
If something headed for Earth does crop up, Atlas can post an update to its web pages.
Astronomers at institutions like Nasa or the International Astronomical
Union’s Minor Planet Center have automated scripts that scour such web-pages for new
information. This is how they know as soon as a possible discovery has been made. Astronomers
can then begin plotting trajectories and predicting impact sites.

Rumpf points out that some larger asteroids are in a regular orbit around the sun, usually an oval-
shaped path that may or may not intersect with Earth at some point in the future. Possible future
impacts of such asteroids are easier to predict – but not all space rocks play nice.
“[Some] are on irregular orbits because they are not bound by the sun,” explains Rumpf. “They
kind of come out of nowhere.”

Systems like Atlas might be particularly useful, in theory, at spotting those just in time.
By studying how light reflects off different kinds of rocks, such as those with higher metal
content and so on, scientists can then make predictions about asteroids flying towards Earth
based on the light they themselves reflect, says Alessondra Springmann, a planetary radar
astronomer at the University of Arizona.

“If the asteroid comes close enough you can use radar – if you have shape, volume and
composition then you can perhaps work out the density,” she adds.
That can help predict what kind of explosion a large asteroid might make as it enters Earth’s
atmosphere. The more solid and the heavier it is, the worse the news could be for mankind.
What if we find an asteroid so big that it could threaten thousands or millions of lives? Or throw
up so much debris into our atmosphere that the climate would be damaged for a very long time?
Ideally, we’d spot such a monster long before it arrived, which might give us time to defend
ourselves. Springmann notes that there are a couple of ideas for how to do this – including
launching a “gravitational tractor”. This would involve blasting a spacecraft towards the asteroid
and positioning it close enough that the, albeit tiny, gravitational pull of the craft could steer the
asteroid off-course.
“If you don’t have a lot of warning, the last ditch effort is to send a kinetic impactor,” she says,
before clarifying: “a bomb”.
If we do ever get the chance to shatter a life-threatening space boulder, it’ll be thanks to
observations made by scientists here on Earth that tell to some degree of confidence us how big
it is, how fast it’s moving – and how likely it is to kill us all.
Featured image by BBC Studios | The Planets2

2
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/can-we-spot-a-killer-asteroid-before-it-hits-earth
Credits: BBC Earth
Researcher in University of Southampton