It seems that we have survived several “end-of-the-world” scenarios but now you can add another reason to celebrate to your list. Another massive asteroid named ‘2011 AG5’ was expected to possibly hit Earth sometime around the year 2040. The asteroid was discovered early in 2011 and ever since we have been keeping track of it’s movement to see if it really could be a world-ender.
Space is a massive place and it can be truly difficult to pinpoint whether or not a single chunk of space rock will hit Earth, but University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomers along with the help of NASA, can safely say that the asteroid is not on a collision course with Earth.
It’s good to know that somebody is watching the skies above us. Now we can only hope that when we are in the path of a giant, we can do something about it. There are a few methods being drawn up about how to avoid an impact. Some of these ideas include crashing spacecraft into astroids to alter their course and steer them away from our planet. However, there are not any solid plans in place at this time to help avoid such impacts.
If there are any space projects that are going to be put together, you would hope that one of the top priority missions would include saving our planet. I would like to see missions that focus on landing on asteroids and studying them, with the ultimate goal being to understand how to alter their trajectory. It sounds simple enough but it takes a lot of force to move these giant and all of this would have to be controlled over long distances. Again, it’s a case of us knowing so much but knowing so little. For now it seems that we have a little more time to figure things out, let’s hope we do before we absolutely have to.
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