Ed Lu is a highly accomplished scientist and an astronaut who has logged 206 days in space over three missions for NASA. Now he's working as the CEO of the B612 Foundation, a non-profit whose goals include protecting the Earth from Armageddon-style asteroid destruction. Oh,...
Forget Armageddon, says Ed Lu. Forget sci-fi space shuttles. Forget burying nuclear bombs in comets. Forget all that. Asteroids are a real and potentially existential threat. But if we find them early enough, they’re fairly easy to deflect. With years or decades, instead of months...
Asteroids of various sizes whiz past our planet all the time. Some we know about, but many we don’t, and new ones are identified on an almost weekly basis. (In fact one such recently-discovered asteroid named 2014 HQ214, an object the length of an aircraft...
When we think of recent large asteroid impacts on Earth, only a handful may come to mind. In particular, one is the forest-flattening 1908 Tunguska explosion over Siberia (which may have been the result of a comet) and another is the February 2013 meteor that...
The chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth and causing significant damage are much higher than what was previously estimated. According to new data released by the B612 Foundation, a non-profit group that aims to launch its Sentinel Space Telescope in 2018 in order to map...
Asteroid impacts on Earth – those on the scale of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago – have been big hits in Hollywood. But in the modern world, are the impacts portrayed in movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon only...
Asteroids as powerful as atomic bombs may hit the Earth more often than we previously thought. New data shows how and where 26 asteroids collided with our planet from 2000 to 2013, according to research released in a video by the B612 Foundation. “It shows that asteroid...
The California-based B612 Foundation has released a video displaying the distribution of 26 multi-kiloton asteroid impacts known to have struck the Earth since the year 2000. Many of the impacts – detected by a network of satellites operated by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization...
On Tuesday, with Earth Day as a backdrop, the B612 Foundation started its presentation about asteroid detection with enough material to fill out an apocalyptic sci-fi film. An introductory video mapped out 26 nuclear-bomb-level impacts recorded on Earth in the last 13 years, a few...
How often, really, do you stop and take the time to be grateful that your entire city hasn’t been wiped out by an asteroid? According to new research, 26 asteroids made it to Earth between 2000 and 2013, so, just saying, maybe you ought to...