Will an Asteroid Wipe Out the Earth?

"This is the Earth, at a time when the dinosaurs roamed a lush and fertile planet. A piece of rock just 6 miles wide changed all that. It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons. A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years. It happened before. It will happen again. It's just a question of when."

• Charlton Heston's narration at the beginning of Armageddon describes the cataclysmic asteroid Earth impact of 65 million years ago.

• Just a mere 2.5 million years ago, an asteroid struck south of the Pacific Ocean producing tsunamis as large as 820 feet, the height of One Atlantic Center, in the Eltanin Event, just as early man was emerging in Africa.

• The 3.5 megaton explosion (about 233 times Hiroshima) caused by a 1908 asteroid impact wiped out 2,000 square kilometers of forest in Siberia.

• 1998 saw the release of two Near Earth Object disaster movies - Armageddon (astronauts blew up the threatening asteroid with the help of a Russian, the planet survived, Bruce Willis didn't) and the more scientifically valid Deep Impact, where two comets are the threat (again, the planet survived, but a megatsunami wiped out a good part of the Atlantic coast of several continents). In both movies, the government knew way before the general public was made aware.

• 2008 saw the Association of Space Explorers International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation call for a global response to asteroid threats, which credits advances in technology with enabling us to detect NEOs at high risk for a devastating strike to Earth.

• April 15, 2010 - President Obama, speaking at the Kennedy Space Center called for astronauts to go to an asteroid in fifteen years.

Is there something our government is not telling us? I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I'm wondering if someone knows something I don't know. I feel better that Bill Nye, the Science Guy and I are on the same page about this trip to an asteroid. He says, "You could be saving humankind. That's worthy, isn't it?"

Citing the asteroid trip as a necessary training mission for the ultimate goal of a manned trip to Mars, Obama is calling for exploration into deep space with a round trip travel time of 200 days. It seems that landing on an asteroid would be a mind-bendingly disorienting experience. The astronauts would be on a rock so small that "the sun would spin across the sky and the horizon would only be a few yards long. At 5 million miles away, the Earth would look like a mere BB in the sky."

But, back to that asteroid business . . .

Asteroids left over from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago usually keep a safe distance in from us in the asteroid belt. With technological advances, more asteroids are discovered in what NASA describes as a typical four-step process.

"Step 1: An asteroid is discovered.
Step 2: Uncertain orbits are calculated from spotty tracking data.
Step 3: Possible Earth impacts are noted.
Step 4: Astronomers watch the asteroid for a while, then realize that it's going to miss our planet."

With the emphasis on Obama's plan to land on an asteroid, we'll be seeing an increase in doomsday predictions. To weed out the lunatic fringe reports and evaluate any disaster predictions, read NASA's blood pressure lowering article here.

Since we aren't returning to the moon or continuing with the Constellation program, much to the dismay of Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan, and Jim Lovell, we may end up hitching a ride with the Russians to the asteroid.

Presidents tend to undue some of their predecessors' work so the next president might scrap Obama's asteroid visit. However, if the presidents following Obama keep the "visiting an asteroid plan" then we might want to find out what's going on.

Sources:

http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?aBID=58381&p=3&topicID=5426654
http://www.space-explorers.org/committees/NEO/docs/ATACGR.pdf
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvDhvPm9l5fHqiHIU5uc6Gpzs-MAD9F4C2NG0
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/quotes
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/13may_2004mn4/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36476183