Entry bubble Meteorite Watch

By: Jake | June 23, 2008 | Category: General

A century ago June 30th, settlers and tribes near the Tunguska River in Russia saw a flash in the sky. Then they heard what sounded like artillery fire and experienced a shock wave that knocked some people to the ground, destroyed nearby trees and broke windows hundreds of miles away. Meteor Shower

Scientists call this phenomenon the "Tunguska event" and believe the explosion was caused by a large meteoroid or comet fragment entering the Earth's atmosphere and exploding in the sky. Experts say that if the meteor had hit four hours later it would have destroyed the imperial capital of Russia, St. Petersburg.

I'd never heard of the Tunguska event until a GovGab commenter asked me what the likelihood of another Tunguska type event was and how we might avert a situation where a space rock would hit the Earth's surface. I can't answer that question, but the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a program that can.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Program based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California monitors the threat of near-Earth objects (asteroids and comet debris) and they say the risk of such an impact is low. In fact, it's lower than the daily risks we face like automobile accidents, disease or natural disasters. Still the NEO Program says monitoring space for potential threats and identifying them years before they can occur helps keep this risk low.

The NEO Program's Sentry impact assessment system continually scans the current asteroid catalog for potential impacts over the next 100 years. If a major threat is found, the NEO Program says the solution is not to destroy the object like they do in the movies, but to simply divert the object from the Earth's path. NEO says this can potentially be done by attaching rocket boosters to a near-Earth object to change its course.

The NEO program demonstrates this process and other facts about near-Earth objects in their "Keeping an Eye on Space Rocks" multimedia presentation. The NEO Program is not the only place on Earth that has their eye on the sky monitoring near-Earth objects; there are a number of other nations also studying them.

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