Washington DC, USA: NASA chief Jim Bridenstine on Thursday talked about the dangers of a meteor shower and why they should be taken more seriously.
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Warning US citizens — and effectively the rest of the world too — of the dangers of meteor explosions, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine earlier yesterday cautioned that meteors are a major threat to the planet, one that we should be taking more seriously.
Bridenstine went on to add that the threat is so serious that every 60 years or so the Earth is at the risk of being hit by a meteor causing serious damage in the process.
Speaking during the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland, he said that NASA is preparing to tackle any such eventuality and as such is working on solutions to detecting, tracking and studying meteor and other near-Earth objects.
“We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it’s not about movies… This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life and that is the planet Earth.” he said on Monday, speaking at the Planetary Defense Conference in Washington DC.
As per a report published by the CNN, he urged the gathered crowd to take meteor explosions more seriously as Bridenstine spoke about a February 2013 meteor that exploded over Russia to explain the kind of damage meteors can do our planet.
As an example, he talked about the major havoc wreaked by a 65-foot meteor that traveled at a speed of more than 18 kilometers per second, and exploded about 23 kilometers above the Earth’s surface over the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. As per reports, the meteor damaged thousands of buildings and sent more than 1,500 people to the hospital — most from the debris caused by the shockwave. And all this without even touching the Earth’s surface.
“It was brighter in the sky than the sun at that point when it entered Earth’s atmosphere. And people could feel the heat from this object from 62 kilometers away… When it finally exploded 18 miles above the surface…it had…30 times the energy of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima… It damaged buildings in six cities.”
Bridenstine further went on to add that these events are not rare and according to one model, we should expect a similar collision once every 60 years.
However, all is not lost.
NASA is currently working on a program to deal with the risk posed by such meteors. The space agency plans to track 90 per cent of asteroids which are 140 meters or larger in size to ensure that we are better prepared for any eventuality.
It is also working in partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and recently paid the company $69 million for a joint mission — the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) — to deal with such rogue meteors which may cause a threat to the Earth.
Stay tuned for more updates!
