The space agency decided to act more carefully and quickly by developing a new project to protect Earth. NASA will supposedly build a new space telescope to explore better the possibilities of asteroids that could hit our planet. Scientists from the space agency have started a so-called project the ‘Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission,” confirmed and approved later this year, in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The project aims that the space telescope to become active in 2025.
NASA tracks significant asteroids close to our planet to check whether they are harmful and likely to collide and cause any damage. It is, however, impossible to catch every glimpse of a dangerous asteroid each time, and scientists end up taken by surprise. As it was reported later this year, an asteroid named 2019 MO, it was identified only hours before it crashed into Earth. The collision happened back on June 29, and the asteroid had burnt up in the atmosphere above the Caribbean.
Kelly Fast, the lead researcher of the project, explained: “The whole point is to be able to find all of these asteroids and to catalog their orbits precisely and to calculate them into the future.”
Back in 2005, NASA got some instruction from Congress to track 90 % of possibly harmful asteroids bigger than 450 feet long by the final of next year. This request, however, it was almost impossible to be done due to insufficient funds, but thanks to some 2016 changes, NASA identified 564 asteroids so far.
Space.com reported how 360 asteroids of that dimension were identified only in 2019. If we imagine an asteroid collision, the results would be disastrous. Such an event would wipe out the entire Earth, something similar to what happened to dinosaurs.
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