CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — So, the world did not end Friday because of an asteroid blast or any of the other calamities imagined to be predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar.
But some say a serious asteroid strike is just a matter of time, and we should be ready.
For evidence of what might come, see the 1908 “Tunguska event” in Siberia, said Ed Lu, a former shuttle and International Space Station astronaut who heads the nonprofit B612 Foundation (the name refers to the asteroid home in “The Little Prince.”)
A relatively small comet or asteroid that exploded before hitting the ground wiped out that unpopulated area of Siberia in 1908 with a force 1,000 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leveling forests, photographs later showed.
“These hit the Earth about every 100 to 200 years,” Lu said this fall. “So flip a coin. That's the odds that somewhere on Earth during your lifetime it's going to happen again. Random spot. Most of the world is unpopulated. But wouldn't it be a shame if it was a populated area?”
No such strike is imminent, but the Mountain View, Calif.-based foundation has embarked on a privately funded mission, called Sentinel, that it believes could save humanity from going the way of the dinosaurs.
The mission plans to catalog 90 percent of the near-Earth asteroids at least 460 feet wide that could cause devastating damage, plus many more as small as 100 feet, to provide the notice needed to deflect any threats.
Deflecting an asteroid is relatively easy with enough warning, because its velocity need only be tweaked very slightly to turn a hit into a miss, Lu said. A spacecraft could impact an asteroid or act as a “gravity tractor” to pull that off.
The problem, Lu said, is that we know the locations of only a fraction of the asteroids that whiz through Earth's vicinity.
“We're driving around the solar system with our eyes closed, essentially, and that seems kind of crazy, right?” he said. “Because these things do hit the Earth.”
