Category: NASA

Asteroids. I have quite a fascination for them actually. Not the type travelling harmlessly around the asteroid belt though, oh no, I like the concept of one hurtling towards Earth and threatening to wipe us all out, and more importantly, what we would – and could – do about it. We’re making advances in space travel, sending probes and what not further out, preparing to send people to live on Mars, identifying planets that could quite possibly sustain life… but what are our chances of stopping (or diverting) a killer asteroid? I’ve watched films with this concept – Armageddon, Deep Impact, and several b-grade movies on the sci-fi channel whose film names escape me, possibly because they were beyond awful. View Spoiler » In Armageddon, a drilling crew lands on the approaching asteroid, somehow managing to drill through titanium plate and blow the rock to smithereens. The crew of Deep Impact aren’t as lucky as Team Armageddon. They only manage to blow the asteroid into two pieces, and while the larger part cruises off into deep space, the smaller part enters Earth’s atmosphere with some amazing special effects, and with a lesser destructive force then the whole. « Hide Spoiler   Near Earth Objects Nasa’s Near Earth Object Program was established in 1998 with a view to identifying near-earth asteroids larger than one kilometer. The chart on the left shows...