| Asteroids: the little ones are the killers |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Sunday, 11 March 2007 | |
  
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At present, NASA has not even scratched the surface of initiating the necessary work needed to identify all the small potential killers of the scale of Tunguska. The ominous sounding Planetary Defense Conference, held March 5-8 in Washington D.C., is set to produce a new white paper to follow up the 2004 effort titled Protecting Earth from Asteroids. The aim is to inject urgency and gain the political will to fund the effort needed to weed out the smaller rogue asteroids. The large asteroids with diameters measured in kilometers are not thought to be dangerous because the probability is so small that any are on a collision course with the Earth in the foreseeable future. However, there are so many unidentified smaller asteroids, that there is a statistically significant risk that some could be a disaster in the making for our planet. While large asteroids are believed to have hit the Earth in past epochs, one such impact perhaps leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs, smaller strikes like the Tunguska event are believed to happen far more frequently. Such strikes could result in the death of millions of people, creating devastation on a scale equivalent to several large nuclear bombs.{moscomment} |
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