According to the , quoted by Telegraph, Kelly Fast, who is leading the efforts of the US Space Agency to track near-Earth celestial objects such as asteroids and meteorites, announced that about 15,000 medium-sized space rocks have not yet been accounted for.
These rocks, which are known as city killers, are at least 140 meters in diameter, and if they hit a populated area on Earth, they will cause regional damage.
Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, also warned that if one of these rocks were to hit Earth, the planet would have no way to defend itself.
Chabot is leading the DART mission, which will deliberately ram a special spacecraft into a small moon called Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour to alter its orbit. The success of this mission has been heralded as a way to protect Earth, although there are no other spacecraft currently available for use in future missions.
A space rock the size of a football field had previously appeared to hit Earth, and astronomers were on high alert. Asteroid YR4 passed by on Christmas Day 2024, but was not seen until a week later. An analysis of its trajectory showed it was moving away from Earth at about 38,000 miles per hour, but its orbit could put it on a collision course in 2032.
The calculated risk of it hitting the Earth was four percent, but further analysis showed that this rock will pass by the Earth within the next seven years.
However, there is still a chance that it will hit the moon, and research suggests that it will be so violent that it will be visible to the naked eye from Earth.
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