Over the last few weeks, Earth has had quite a few asteroids that have passed by quite closely. Among them was asteroid 1994 PC 1, which flew past Earth on January 18 and managed to create a lot of buzz due to its big size and proximity to Earth. The 1km wide space rock was considered potentially hazardous and NASA stated that it had been watching the asteroid for the last 10 years. It does raise an important question. How big does an asteroid need to be to destroy Earth or at least cause significant damage? This is an important question and thanks to NASA, we know the answers too. And it is scarier than we thought.
The thing most people do not realize is that Earth hit by asteroid strikes quite often. Thousands of asteroids, meteors and other space rocks hit Earth almost every day. But 90-95% of them never make it to the surface. We can thank our atmosphere and ozone layer for that. Earth basically has these layers of atmosphere with increasingly denser air as you keep moving towards the surface. When an object moves at high speed through this dense air, it generates heat and burns up on entry. Interestingly, most asteroids burn up in the mesosphere itself and do not even make it to denser layers of the stratosphere or the troposphere (densest of them all). While our planet’s natural defense system protects us from the majority of asteroids, if an asteroid is large enough, it will still make it to the surface.
On March 21, 2021, a meteor was seen bursting through the day sky and exploding in a huge ball of fire in Santiago de Cuba. It was later found out that the meteor was only a few meters wide and weighed about 360 tons. An asteroid, which was just a few meters wide, almost touched the surface of Earth. So, what we do
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