Nasa has discovered two asteroids that could be on a collision course with our planet.
The space agency keeps a database called Sentry that contains details of all the space rocks with a chance of smashing into Earth. This list is updated every time a new object that could hit humanity’s homeworld is discovered. In the past six months alone, two separate rocks have been discovered which could crash into us.
The first is called 2019 ND7 and was observed in July. This beast is almost 200 meters wide, which is large enough to wipe out an entire city.
It could be bigger than a meteor which detonated over Tunguska, Russia, in 1908 and flattened trees over an area of 770 square miles. The ‘Tunguska event’ caused an explosion of 15-megatons – which is roughly 1,000 times greater than that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. The rock which caused this mighty kaboom was between 60 and 1,000 meters wide, although most estimates indicate it was at the smaller size of this range.
Describing this incident, Nasa wrote: ‘Although a meteor the size of the Tunguska can level a city, metropolitan areas take up such a small fraction of the Earth’s surface that a direct impact on one is relatively unlikely. ‘More likely is an impact in the water near a city that creates a dangerous tsunami.’
Luckily, there is only a very small chance of the asteroid hitting Earth. Nasa has calculated the risk at 1 in 310,000, meaning there’s a 99.99968% chance the asteroid will miss the Earth.
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