Page 76 - General_Knowledge_8

Enlighten Me!

Dealing With the Potential Danger of a Meteor Hitting Earth

Our solar system is like a busy traffic round-about. The sun is at the centre of this round-about which
drives a large number of heavenly bodies, including planets, comets and large and small rocks around
it.
While the earth and the other planets
chart fairly fixed paths around the sun,
our smaller solar siblings, like rocks, do
not believe in staying in their lanes. As
a result, a large rock – the size of a small
city – bangs into the earth every once in
a while.
One such collision may have caused the
extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million
years ago. The effect of the collision can
be seen on the plains of Mexico in the
shape of a mile long crater. However,
humans can do more than being sitting
ducks if there is a similar shoot out now.
That seems to be the idea of a group of
scientists, from the Department of Space Studies, Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colorado,
US. They are trying to make the world agree to a standard procedure to deal with such a possibility.
They propose that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (An US organisation that manages
emergency situations like hurricanes or floods) should also recognise a meteor impact as a potential
danger and respond to it the way it responds to floods, hurricanes and earthquakes.
They want to make people and the government believe that the threat, though remote, is massive
enough to lay down disaster management strategies for.
An attempt has been made to identify objects that can strike the earth. These objects, which are a mix of
comets and asteroids are called ‘Near Earth Objects’ or NEO. The scientists have been able to identify
1,100 such potentially dangerous NEOs.
A potential impact warning has to be calculated and reported years or even decades earlier as that is
the amount of time that would be required to handle such a big threat. Scientists propose attaching the
comet with a huge rocket to nudge it away or striking the comet with a nuclear warhead in an attempt
to smash it to pieces.
However, the scientists believe that such an operation would require space observatories, scientists
and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) to work together.
One such threat was cited when astronomers announced that an object, known as 2000 SG344, had a
1-in-500 chance of hitting the Earth in 2030. The world, however, still does not have a standard method
of responding to such a threat.

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