To find out just how much damage an Earth impact could cause you can check an online tool provided by the Imperial College of London and Purdue University. This event is credited with being the inspiration for the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Another thought to be of similar size around 3,700 years ago wiped out the city of Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley and the surrounding area couldn’t be farmed for at least 300 years. The force of the blast, known as the Tunguska event, was equivalent to that of a 12 megaton bomb and leveled an area of around 830 square miles. In 1908, a meteor perhaps 20 meters across detonated over the Siberian forest in Russia. However, even small celestial bodies that enter Earth’s atmosphere can cause extreme damage if they explode before reaching the ground. Still, every 2,000 years, give or take, a space rock the size of a football field, which is big enough to cause significant local damage, enters our atmosphere. Most meteors burn up on entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the friction with the air vaporizes them or breaks them in to smaller pieces that are generally not dangerous. You may be interested in: ‘Planet killer’ asteroid detected: Could it hit the Earth? When? Asteroids don’t need to be big to be destructive (1/2) /SaLC0AUSdP- NASA Asteroid Watch March 7, 2023 Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future. We've been tracking a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046.
#METEORITE HITTING EARTH WINDOWS#
It generated a shockwave which damaged thousands of buildings and injured roughly 1,500 people as windows exploded. In 2013, a meteor less than half the size of the newly discovered space rock exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. For that reason, the asteroid has been given a 1 on the Torino Scale as “the chance of collision is extremely unlikely” and that with additional observations it will “very likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0″ or zero chance of a collision.Įven if 2023 DW were to hit Earth, it wouldn’t be a cataclysmic event but it could cause extreme damage locally were it to explode in the atmosphere. And when it does, it will only come within 1.1 million miles of our planet. Meteor Showers Several meteors per hour can usually be seen on any given night. When a meteoroid survives its trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground, it’s called a meteorite. According to the observations so far, t he roughly 160-foot (49m) in diameter Near Earth Object (NEO) has a slight chance, 1 in 560 or 0.18%, of crashing into Earth, but the public shouldn’t get alarmed.įurthermore, it won’t make its closest approach to Earth for another 23 years, on Valentine’s Day 2046. Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons (44,000 kilograms) of meteoritic material falls on Earth each day. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is tracking a newly discovered asteroid named 2023 DW.
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