A catastrophic collision with an asteroid is not only one of the sci-fi concepts, but also an event that will surely happen at a certain moment – in any case, representatives of the American space agency NASA are sure of this. In their opinion, despite the obvious (although potentially not close) danger of a collision of the Earth with an asteroid, humanity has not yet done practically anything to prevent such a catastrophe.
While NASA's defensive operations budget is very small so far, it is unclear how things will change under the Trump administration, according to Discover. So in 2015, NASA cut funding for the Sentinel mission, designed specifically to accurately determine the asteroids entering the Earth's atmosphere, and at the moment such projects are largely dependent on private donations. In a new report, the federal agency draws attention to the need for increased support for space threat detection and deflection efforts and presents a multi-faceted, long-term plan to defend Earth from rocky space travelers.
It is believed that a stone 40 or 50 meters in diameter can wipe out a city from the face of the Earth, and if its diameter is a kilometer, an entire continent may suffer. In 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteorite with a diameter of only 20 meters, formed an explosion of such power that almost all windows in the area were broken and hundreds of people were injured. In 1908, the Tunguska meteorite, which fell in an uninhabited area of Siberia, mowed down more than 1000 square kilometers of forest, and the force of its explosion was from five to 10 megatons in TNT equivalent. It is noteworthy that in both cases, as such, there was no collision with the Earth.
Today NASA insists on providing them with all the necessary resources in order to timely detect dangerous space bodies. The mission project, which requires significant subsidies from the budget, may take more than ten years to be implemented, but the agency representatives are confident that it is necessary to start now.
