Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
Saturday, September 26, 2015 - 11:20
in Astronomy & Space
You often see sensational news stories, saying a giant asteroid will hit Earth, or nearly miss us. Many of us worry about these things. So what is the truth behind them?Actually astronomers have this well in hand. They have found 90% of the largest asteroids likely to hit Earth. This is mainly due to Pan-STARRS, which takes a 1.4 gigapixel image of a three degrees span of the night sky several times a minute. It continues to find a new large asteroid about once a month, and will find most of the remaining 10% by the 2020s. read more