The US space agency, NASA has confirmed that asteroids that are entering Earth’s orbit can cause serious damage that even “modern technology cannot save”. Such an encounter can turn our “peaceful life into a disaster movie”. Sometimes an asteroid can be so large that it causes a global planetary catastrophe.
For Earth, this happens once every several million years.
There is evidence of what can happen when a stray asteroid crashes into the planet.
Most scientists believe that the asteroid that fell near the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico caused the most disastrous impact in the history of Earth.
The asteroid raised such a huge cloud of dust that it completely changed the climate of the planet.
According to scientists, this celestial object was to blame for the extinction of dinosaurs abut 65 million years ago.
Scientists have begun to take the likelihood of asteroids hitting Earth again more seriously because of the Yarkovsky effect.
PhD Meteorite specialist, Helena Bates, explained: “The Yarkovsky effect is basically when the Sun heats up one side of the rotating body so the asteroid is rotating as it orbits the Sun.
“And as one side heats up, it kind of absorbs heat and then, as it rotates, that side will begin to face away from the Sun and will radiate that heat outwards.”
She said: “That basically acts like a small thruster to push the asteroid into a slightly different orbit.
“And because the amount of heat that the asteroid absorbs is to do with things like composition, what the asteroids made of, which we don’t know, that means it’s really really hard to predict the effect of the Sun.”
These asteroids can sometimes be in the solar system absorbing Sun for billions of years. Scientists have discovered that this sometimes makes big differences to their trajectories.
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Ms Bates added that: “Some of the asteroids that are in the asteroid belt can be deflected so much that they come onto Earth, crossing orbits.
“These are the ones that are dangerous to us because if they’re crossing Earth’s orbit there is a very very small chance that Earth might be there when they’re crossing that orbit.
“So we’re looking into it and scientists are very interested in the effect of this.
“It’s actually one of the focuses of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which is a sample return mission.”
The US space agency’s main goal for the mission is to obtain a sample of a near-Earth asteroid, and return the sample for a detailed analysis. It was launched in September 2016.
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