TheB612 Foundationhas released avisualizationdepicting the asteroid impact with Earth between 2001 and 2013 , which bring out that they are surprisingly , and perhaps scarily , common .
A connection of hearing stations used to detect atomic blowup , which is operated by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization , find fault up 26 explosions on Earth during this period from the humble frequency infrasound pulses that they emit . They ranged from 1 to 600 kiloton in energy . For the sake of comparison- the 1945 Hiroshima bomb calorimeter had an energy impact of “ only ” 15 , so some of these blowup were pretty big .
These results attest that asteroid impacts are certainly not rarefied events . The fact that none of them have any meaning wrong is sheer luck , however , the majority of them exploded too eminent for them to do much damage once when they reach the ground . Still , it highlights the demand for an idea of the frequency of an impact with a potentially crushing asteroid .
Some celebrated retiring events include the1908 explosionover Tunguska , Siberia , which had an impact of between 5 - 15 megatons and flattened some 80 million trees , and the 2013 impingement over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk which had an impingement of 600 kiloton .
harmonize to Dr. Ed Lu , who was one of the astronauts presenting the findings at the Seattle Museum of Flight yesterday , “ While most orotund asteroid with the potential drop to destroy an full country or continent have been detected , less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroid with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan orbit have been found by all be space or mundanely - maneuver observatories . ”
It ’s not all end of the world and sombreness ; the B612 foundation are hope to build an infrared space observatory , the Sentinel Space Telescope , which would mother elaborate maps of our inner solar system which could be used to notice asteroids betimes enough to deflect them . It is predicted to launch in 2018 , so hold tight until then .
Check out the B612 asteroid visualization below :
