Asteroids. Asteroids hit the Earth – this fact was made glaringly obvious by the impact event on February 15, 2013 over Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, that injured about 1600 people, and caused millions of dollars of property damage. This event was all over the news and social media – yet oddly, I’ve recently spoken with some people who had not heard it. Asteroids hit the Earth more frequently then astronomers previously thought; using data from Earth-bound infra-sound detectors and satellites, it was discovered that between 2000-2013, Earth was hit 26 times by Asteroids, with explosions ranging from 1-600 kilotons; the 1945 Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons. Several of these impacts would have caused serious damage if they had exploded over a city, rather than harmlessly over the ocean or uninhabited regions. Recent advances in imaging and data processing have allowed astronomers to discover thousands of Near-Earth Asteroids, and hundreds of thousands of Main-Belt Asteroids; as of this writing, there are 1590 … Continue reading →