A Major Asteroid Might Crash Into Our Planet, Said NASA’s Chief

The administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine considers the panorama of a deadly asteroid crashing with our planet is not something held in reserve for science fiction films.  Recently, at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in Washington, D.C., Bridenstine made the case for why the United States should invigorate its resistance counter to meteor events. NASA along with other parties will do a defense drill at the conference that pretends the conditions if an asteroid were approaching straight for our planet.

Bridenstine added that the people should realize that this is not about a Hollywood movie. The move is about eventually saving our planet which is the only one so far to host life. Bridenstine pointed to the Chelyabinsk Event as an indication of the growing significance and possibilities for these events. The meteor that has burned through the southern Ural Mountain range in February 2013, was the biggest logged meteor attack in more than a century, subsequently the Tunguska event which happened in 1908. The shock wave from the explosion has injured over 1,600 people and the event was likely to be as intense as 20 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. However, those kinds of events are projected to happen once every 60 years, as per Bridenstine, these events have happened three times in the past 100 years.

By this understanding, it means that another event on the scale of the Chelyabinsk Event might happen within our lifespan. Bridenstine added that these events are extraordinarily unique, but they are not. Bridenstine further addressed that such planetary defense is just as serious as other objectives of the space agency, like the touchdown of humans on the lunar. Bridenstine said that the space agency is working to identify and path 90 percent of adjacent asteroids that are 459ft or even bigger than that, which might cause possible deadly harm upon impact.