Where will the asteroid hit in February?

Esa and NASA's joint Hades mission, which is applied to asteroid protection, should lead to this knowledge. The distance was about 1.8 million kilometers or 4.6 times the Earth-Moon distance. As dense as the earth's moon. It will be close, explains Wünnemann. But: “Everything that passes is not dangerous.”

By definition, meteorites are more or less large fragments of asteroids or comets that land on Earth. However, most of these bodies burn up upon entering the Earth's atmosphere, the resulting glowing phenomenon is called a meteor. Often, cosmic chunks of rock fall into the sea or float down uninhabited areas, so the consequences often go unnoticed. Here the impact on populated regions is extremely rare. Could this affect the meteorite, as in Chelyabinsk, Germany? "It's not impossible, but it's unlikely," says Manfred Gajda of the German Aerospace Center, "only because of Germany's relatively small area."

Most extraterrestrial rocks burn up on their way to Earth

However, in general: a meteorite can fall anywhere in the world. However, the risk of hitting such a stone is very low. He will most likely be killed by lightning. There are several classes of meteorites. They are usually predominantly silicate minerals or an iron-nickel alloy, and many also contain higher amounts of carbon. Large objects with masses of several tons are unlikely to be slowed down by air resistance. The fireball, consisting of frozen gases, must be about 100 meters in diameter to survive its passage through the earth's atmosphere, iron-nickel 30 meters.

These projectiles hit earth's surface at speeds from 10 to 70 kilometers per second and can penetrate to depths of up to 100 meters. This creates a typical meteorite crater because the surrounding material is blown away by the intense impact energy. The planets and our solar system are literally littered with meteorite craters. Also, the earth is no exception: in the past, it has been hit again and again by meteorites of all size classes. But with erosion and weathering, traces of most impacts were erased from their surface.

Today, about 200 large impact structures are known. The impact was 65 million years ago and likely extinguished. The pollutant was a 10 km class asteroid. Fortunately, such space projectiles rarely hit Earth every 100 million years. There are 1-meter meteorite hits once a year, but most of them land in the sea.

We're talking about a rock no more than twenty meters in size that could generate almost thirty times more energy than the Hiroshima bomb, although fortunately almost all of this energy was dissipated in the atmosphere. And this has raised troubling questions: If we didn't see it coming, what are the chances of being surprised by an even bigger and more dangerous meteorite?

The truth is that the proximity of Earth's orbit receives a lot of visits. And then there's this: If you were looking at the lost moon in a dream in May of that year, and you were in a place with little pollution, you might have been able to see with your naked eye a brief flare caused by the impact of an asteroid against our moon.

This is all over the course of a few months, so the threat of an asteroid or comet impact should not be taken as a joke. Interplanetary space is not as empty as we might have assumed, and the transit of material is constant. Space dust: despite the possible double joke reading, we're just talking about large quantities particles less than one millimeter in size. -Steroids: Rocky objects that, although very small compared to planets, can sometimes reach several kilometers in diameter. -Composition: objects containing ice or gases, the evaporation of which leads to coma, this luminous tail, which in exceptional cases is clearly visible from the Earth even in broad daylight and with the naked eye.

Like asteroids, their cores can also measure several kilometers in diameter. -Meteoroids: Small asteroids are generally considered small if they have a diameter of less than 50 meters, like the one that exploded in Russia this year. -Meteor: Any of the above objects that survive impact with the Earth's atmosphere and directly impact the surface. - Meteor: A luminous phenomenon created by the entry of an object into the Earth's atmosphere, but which does not affect the surface.

Recent asteroid impact on the Moon in May. In fact, about a hundred tons of space material fall to Earth every twenty-four hours, attracted by our planet's gravity. Of course, the vast majority are tiny dust particles from comet breakups or collisions between asteroids. Often these tiny particles are enough to create a fleeting but bright trail of light in the night sky, a “shooting star”, before whose vision we smile or even ask for a wish. As we know from this romantic picture, the Earth is bombarded daily by tiny meteors that can never cross the atmosphere without being thrown away and whose ability to harm us is absolutely nil.

But among all this cosmic dust there are also several objects of noticeable size that could have very serious consequences if they hit Earth, and it is certainly a matter of time before one of these large objects hits our planet. If you prefer to keep the hopeful part of matter, you can take refuge in statistics: for huge sizes solar system we can say that the number of threatening objects is decreasing. In fact, it is estimated that the likelihood of a direct impact from a large asteroid is almost negligible in the temporary conditions of human life.

One asteroid with a diameter of one kilometer would impact the Earth every two hundred thousand years at most. A five-kilometer asteroid fell only once every ten million years. And another hundred kilometers, at least once every hundred million years. You might say, "Oh, well, then there's nothing to worry about." The problem is that these statistics tell us the global probability of an impact occurring over a period of time, yes, but it doesn't actually tell us at what point in that period it will occur.

If a stock kilometer mastodon falls every hundred million years, does it do so at the beginning or end of that period? As unlikely as it may seem, it could happen tomorrow. This can happen twice in a row. That's what statistics are: they give us the big picture of a situation, but they don't really help get into the "when will it happen" style details.

It's completely unpredictable. Apart from what inaccurate statistics always seem to say, the only way to get reliable information about the exact moment during which an object could have hit Earth is to find them using astronomical instruments. In other words, there are thousands of space objects floating around it, the orbit of which will sooner or later pass very close to our planet.

But what will be the consequences of exposure? Obviously, the answer depends on the size of the asteroid, the angle at which it hits, and the exact location in our geography where it hits. Estimates of the destruction potential of these objects are always approximate, since they depend on many factors and necessarily contain errors. But let's try to figure it out, collecting geological data on impacts that occurred earlier, for example. Or observing recent phenomena such as the commented February asteroid.

The Tunguska episode is attributed to an asteroid, or rather a piece of a medium-sized comet, and is the only historical evidence of such an event in the era of human civilization. Although events such as Tunguska may be relatively frequent, although not always observed by the population, which, as we remember, were very scarce until several centuries ago. Small meteorite impacts, which do not always disintegrate in the atmosphere, are much more common. In the last decade, meteorites have fallen on houses or buildings in Cali, Colombia or Chinese city Zunhua.

Obviously, the recovery of these meteorites allows them to be identified as being of extraterrestrial origin. But let's put ourselves in the worst case and imagine a rock that is much larger than the one that erupted a few months ago in Russia and even the famous and mysterious Tunguska site. Imagine that a one kilometer asteroid hits the Earth, for example. This would create the equivalent of an earthquake of magnitude 9.5 on the Richter scale throughout the surrounding region: more or less the intensity of the largest earthquake we have recorded in modern measuring systems.

It would also create a crater twenty-four kilometers in diameter, more than enough to swallow the largest of our cities. The airburst could extend for one hundred and fifty kilometers around, causing various types of damage. Three hundred kilometers away, he could still knock down a few trees and blow out windows. This: if a one kilometer asteroid hits Madrid, it is possible that even in Valencia Zaragoza or Cordoba were injured by glass fragments, breaking the windows of their own houses and vice versa.

But let's be even more pessimistic and imagine a rock ten times larger, ten kilometers in diameter, falling on our planet. This ten-kilometer asteroid will produce a 12-degree Richter earthquake in the area of ​​impact - an intensity we have never recorded in our seismographs - although the region will be completely removed from the map immediately, becoming a crater. about two hundred kilometers. Malasombra's shockwave shook the forests and populations of a thousand kilometers of terrain around him, although he allowed himself to feel one way or another four thousand kilometers away.

This asteroid could hit Warsaw or Athens, and the noise of the impact will wake you from your siesta in almost every corner of Spain, except perhaps Canary Islands. In the case, of course, that he had not yet woken up when he felt a huge earthquake. Thus, during the same exposure, Malasombra could reduce small country to rubble. But the consequences of this impact will also be global and will depend on whether it occurs on land or at sea. To fall into the ocean, a terrible tsunami will occur.

Our hypothetical Malasombra would make waves of unimaginable size; some come to estimate that, given the exact conditions, they could reach thousands of meters in their highest point. Even after they had traveled several thousand kilometers from the point of impact, these waves could continue to measure one hundred meters in height at coastal areas, very far from the epicenter. These regions will be washed away with even worse consequences than those that occurred in the last tsunamis that we can all remember.