NASA finds 10,000th near-Earth object to come close to hitting us

Near-Earth objects, or NEOs, are comets and asteroids that come within 45 million kilometers of our planet. NASA has identified its 10,000th NEO, leaving about 100,000 more to be discovered, according to Discovery News.

 

As they orbit around the sun, most NEOs will approach Earth in a harmless flyby. Though a majority of these NEOs are tiny lumps of rock and ice measuring no more than a few feet wide, some are truly enormous, reaching up to several kilometers in diameter. One such example is 1036 Ganymed, which is 41 kilometers across.

 

Though NASA’s 10,000th NEO is nowhere near as huge as the aforementioned behemoth, the asteroid 2013 MZ5 is still quite large at 1,000 feet or 300 meters wide.

 

“Finding 10,000 near-Earth objects is a significant milestone,” said Lindley Johnson, who serves as program executive for NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations (NEOO) Program located at NASA Headquarters. “But there are at least 10 times that many more to be found before we can be assured we will have found any and all that could impact and do significant harm to the citizens of Earth.”

 

Pan-STARRS-1, a telescope based in Maui, was responsible for spotting 2013 MZ5. The asteroid has already been deemed by NASA as a non-threat to our planet.

 

Though NASA has been discovering many approaching comets and asteroids for the past 15 years, stargazers have been aware of NEOs since before the dawn of the previous century.

 

“The first near-Earth object was discovered in 1898,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “Over the next hundred years, only about 500 had been found. But then, with the advent of NASA’s NEO Observations program in 1998, we’ve been racking them up ever since. And with new, more capable systems coming on line, we are learning even more about where the NEOs are currently in our solar system, and where they will be in the future.”

 

NASA has observed that 1,000 of the 10,000 identified NEOs are larger than one-kilometer across. Should any one of them strike Earth, it would spell untold catastrophe for all life on the planet. Thankfully, none of them appear to be on a collision course with Earth. In addition, NASA believes that, out of the 100,000 undiscovered NEOs, only a few dozen large, potentially hazardous ones remain to be found.

 

Though lacking the capacity for planet-wide destruction of their lager cousins, any NEO measuring 30 meters or bigger crashing into a populated locale can still cause devastation, as was demonstrated by the 15-meter asteroid that exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, this February.

 

Since 2005, NASA has been hard at work scouring our celestial neighborhood for space rocks measuring 140 meters and over. It is estimated that around 15,000 of these NEOs belong to this size category, of which only 30 percent have been found. These figures show that smaller NEOs, which have the potential to inflict significant damage upon cities, should be as much a cause for concern as the larger, 1036 Ganymed-type objects. —TJD, GMA News