It started with a flash. At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, Russia, a southern industrial city known mostly for making tractors. Thanks to smartphones, surveillance cameras, and Russian auto-dash cams, we...
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...
Ed Lu's public presentation at the Museum of Flight in Seattle on Earth Day, April 22, 2014....
Since the start of the 21st century, dozens of incoming asteroids have slammed into Earth, some of them packing far more energy than a city-destroying atomic bomb, a new animation illustrates. The visualization was released in honor of Earth Day by the B612 Foundation — an...
Space rocks big enough to destroy a city hit the Earth much more often than thought, according to an estimate by a private group devoted to preventing disaster from such orbital killers. It took a space rock the size of San Francisco to finish off the...
Watch and share the video below showing just how often Earth is hit by untracked asteroids....
So you know how we all kind of thought that our odds of getting destroyed by an asteroid were remarkably low? Yeah, that was wrong. According to new research, the odds of a large-scale asteroid impact are actually three to ten times higher than we...
Former Astronaut Ed Lu thinks the biggest threat to our existence is up in the air. Way up in the air. His nonprofit, the B612 Foundation, wants to set up a defense perimeter around the planet. Read the Article: "This Ex-Astronaut Is Stalking Asteroids to Save...
In 1990, a NASA scientist named David Morrison wanted to know his chances of being killed by an asteroid. It seemed a bit paranoid. After all, no one had ever been killed that way, and there was only one documented meteorite injury. In 1954, an Alabama...