I once saw the movie Armageddon where Bruce Willis saves the world by drilling a bomb into an asteroid 5 seconds before it destroys the earth. In all the time I was watching it I didn't really consider it was possible that some big rock could end us all in reality. Now NASA is looking for people in real life to search for asteroids that could destroy the earth and for asteroids that scientists can study. This public search effort is one of a series of "grand challenges"-which makes the whole thing sound so....grand. Congress also has an interest in this since in 2005 a law was passed that said that NASA by 2020 had to find 90% of space objects that were big enough to take out a city (140 meters across). Not to worry though, according to NASA, asteroids that are more than 1 kilometer in diameter only hit the earth once every few 1,000 or so years. Although this still sort of freaks me out a little, I think it's cool that NASA is reaching out to us non-science whiz people to look for these things. So move over Mr. Willis, I wanna save the world too!
To read the article I got this information from click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment