Asteroids Essay Research Paper Inour solar system — страница 2

Earth at tremendous velocities causing them to join the molten and create a crust for life. After many years of this, the Earth was formed from hundreds of asteroids combined into one large planet. Asteroids are found to be one of the most fascinating and dangerous things in space. This is because it is difficult to spot every asteroid close to our planet and at any time an asteroid may be spotted very close to Earth with too short a notice to stop it. Asteroid tracking should be very important to the world and more time and money should be put into it. These objects could mean the end of mankind all together. Today we find over 150 craters on our planet some being a few kilometers in diameter. If asteroids this big hit our planet today many living things would be destroyed

within thousands of miles of the impact point. This shows us evidence that many asteroids have collided with this planet in the past that could have ended civilization. Today there is known to be about 163 asteroids that are flying through our solar system that are found hazardous to Earth. In 1997 a mile wide asteroid passed within the distance of the Earth and the Moon when it came 40 000 km from hitting us. This seems to be a lot of room to spare but it isn?t when you take into account the vast amount of space in our solar system. Scientists believe that an asteroid is going to be the closest to Earth on October 26, 2028. Because of the danger asteroids pose NASA funded a program called space watch to try and track asteroids close to Earth. All together NASA spends about $3.5

million US tracking asteroids. This gets very difficult because it takes 10 to 30 years of notice to track an asteroid on its way towards Earth. Asteroids are classified as hazardous if they?re bigger than 1 km wide and found within 8 million kilometers of Earth. It is very probable that a large asteroid will hit the Earth in the future because of the planet?s past experience with asteroid collisions. Scientists estimate that an asteroid more than 800 m in diameter hits the Earth every million years and a smaller one hits every century. An asteroid bigger than 1 km would mean the end of about 30% of the World?s population. This size of an asteroid would be the equivalent explosion to 2 million Hiroshima bombs. This explosion would wipeout population by the destruction of all

living creatures within a hundred mile radius as well as blocking off the Sun with dust and rock particles for weeks or even months. Asteroids are probably the deadliest force that our solar system can produce, one strike could put man back in the dark ages and would kill almost the entire population of our planet. It is for this reason that scientists should focus more on understanding asteroids and research more into the defense of our planet. At the moment we only know where a fraction of the asteroids out there are. The asteroid that could destroy our planet could only be a year away and we don?t even know it exists.