We might be safe, for now, from the kind of catastrophic strike that wiped out the dinosaurs. But what about the small stuff?
It was 2013 and an asteroid the size of an Olympic swimming pool was hurtling very close to Earth. The chance of a collision had been ruled out, but it was a big deal for astronomers. Scientist Paul Chodas was set to appear on a live NASA TV show to explain how the rock was about to whiz by, closer than many satellites and clearly visible through telescopes. An asteroid such as this one, called 2012 DA14, came this close only once every 40 years.
No one had seen the rock careering towards Chelyabinsk. It had approached Earth from the direction of the sun; while telescopes searching for asteroids scan only the nighttime sky, this had arrived in the daytime. As large as the Chelyabinsk blast was – more than 1600 people were injured, mostly due to broken glass – there are other objects out there that pose even bigger concerns.
The rock was the size of an orange. It had an unmistakable sheen. Devillepoix picked it up and carefully placed it in a sampling bag. It felt far heavier than a typical rock – a sign of extraterrestrial origin. Much of the rock disintegrates and vaporises, turning to dust. Anything the size of a pebble or larger that makes it to the ground is generally less than 1 per cent of the rock that entered the atmosphere. The Chelyabinsk object – 20 metres in diameter – scattered small meteorites across snow-covered fields that people were later plucking out like popsicles, says Jenniskens, who visited the site three weeks after the explosion.
The meteorite that Devillepoix found is thought to have broken away from the asteroid belt 50 million years ago.Over millions of years, rocks collide and forces such as gravity from Jupiter can cause them to veer into “highways” that eject them from the belt and towards different regions or even other planets. “They’re not in there and safely out of the way,” Sansom says. “They are slowly migrating.
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