The NASA inspector general (IG) recently excoriated the agency’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program, finding that the effort to locate potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets was poorly resourced and far behind its mandated detection goals. In 2005 Congress tasked NASA with locating 90 percent of NEOs...
[vc_column_text width="1/1" el_position="first last"] Between 2000 and 2013, a network of sensors that monitors Earth around the clock listening for the infrasound signature of nuclear detonations detected 26 explosions on Earth ranging in energy from 1-600 kilotons – all caused not by nuclear explosions, but rather...
It's only a matter of time before a big comet or asteroid is on a collision course with Earth. Will scientists discover it, and be able to do something about it, ahead of time? Ed Lu is interviewed by PBS' News Hour....
Life before the Apocalypse at 51˚ North ‘This is a very different kind of disaster movie. No Bruce Willis here, to save life on Earth from extinction. This is a movie to change perspectives – and now that we realise the high probability of such a...
If you've ever stopped to peer with suspicion at the sky, wondering how that would go, a mammoth piece of space rock on its way in to bring ruin, the last two years have not been especially restful. In February 2013, a large asteroid ripped...
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...
Watch and share the video below showing just how often Earth is hit by untracked asteroids....
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...
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...