NASA Warns Asteroid Three Times More Dangerous Likely to Hit Earth
- U-Report
VIVA – A NASA scientist has warned that asteroids are three times more dangerous likely to hit Earth than previously thought following new data.
The warning comes from James Garvin, the Goddard Space Flight Center Chief Scientist, who determined four asteroids strong enough to blow off part of the atmosphere hit over one million years. Such sizable space rocks are predicted to strike only once every 600,000 to 7000,000 years.
Garvin and his team analyzed data from several Earth-observing satellites to examine four impact craters and identified larger rings around the sites, determining previous work had misread their findings.
If the new data is correct, the impacts would equate to an explosion 10 times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb in history, resulting in a mass extinction. Garvin presented the findings at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week.
Asteroid / komet.
- Firstpost
The team conducted the study as part of planetary defense research but uncovered more than they could have imagined. Using new high-resolution imagery of four craters made over the past one million years, Gavin could map them in 3D.
The sites included Pantasma in Nicaragua, Bosumtwi in Ghana, Iturralde in Bolivia, and Zhamanshin in Kazakhstan.
“We have focused attention on four complex impact craters that span the past one million of Earth's history, mostly within tropical regions, with differing target rock characteristics,' reads the presentation.
The documents describe the analysis of Pantasma, which was documented as a nine-mile-wide crater left by an asteroid some 800,000 years ago, and it produced the equivalent of 660,000 megatons when it fell to Earth.
Gavin's reanalysis claims the crater is 21 miles wide, and the impact was equivalent to 727,000 megatons, enough to 'blow off part of the Earth's atmosphere and distribute impact glasses globally.'
Then, Garvin's new findings recorded Bosumtwi's crater as having an "outermost rim of 26.8 km with an inner peak ring (with a deep cavity within) of six miles".
"The perhaps more bizarre Zhamanshin impact feature in Kazakhstan reveals an outer putative rim at 18 miles. This comes after initial research suggested that the outer rim was only seven miles.” The team added.
Moreover, data has predicted that an asteroid or comet 3,280 wide or larger hits Earth every 600,000 to 700,000 years and if the new study is correct, it means four have hit our planet in the past million years alone.
