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At the beginning of the week, an asteroid of considerable size passed us by, and most of us didn’t even knew about it. One would think that will all this technology development, we would be able to predict, or even modify, the trajectory of such objects.
However, we appear to be nowhere close to that. There is indeed a program (and we are referring to NASA only here) that tracks the movements of asteroids, and according to one of its representatives, this asteroid was no threat to Earth.
In an interview with Computerworld, Don Yeomand, manager at NASA’s Near Object Program Office, said the asteroid came quite close celestially speaking, however “it was never a threat to the Earth. On average, something this size hits the Earth about every 500 years-- and an object of this size passes this close on average every three to four years.”
That being said, and now that we’re out of danger, at least for the next 3 or 4 years, the question is: will we ever be able to protect ourselves from a possible impact?
The 1908 event in Tunguska, when an asteroid with similar size hit Earth, has been described as devastating, with its effects being felt on an area of 830 square miles, and damages hundreds of times worse than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The asteroid that passed us by on Monday, first reported by Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in Pasadena, is likely to pass us by again in a few years’ time, astronauts say, but it is unlikely to pose a threat.
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