100th Anniversary of the Tunguska Asteroid
“We are not prepared at this time to prevent the massive death and destruction that would occur if an object from space hit the Earth as it did in Tunguska,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) at a news conference at the Pasadena offices of the Planetary Society.
The anniversary of the Tunguska asteroid originating on June 30, 1908 was used by a group of scientists and a member of Congress to bring attention to make a point about the United States not doing enough to defend Earth against the dangers posed by near-Earth objects. According to their theory, if an asteroid the size of Tunguska one would hit over Los Angeles, the targeted area would range over Catalina Island to San Bernardino, even though no one actually knew what caused the Tunguska event.
It is assumed that the explosion covering an area the size of Tokyo in an 80-size mile area probably was caused by an air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment approximately three to six miles above Earth’s surface. Different studies have shown varying estimates for the object’s size, but basically it was a massive explosion that occurred close by the Lower Stony Tunguska River, now called Krasnoyarsk Krai of Russia.
Located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge to monitor potentially dangerous asteroids is the Near-Earth Object Program Office. According to Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office, the most studied is Apophis which has a one-in-45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036. But according to Alan Harris, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., “the greatest danger does not come from the objects we know about but from the ones we haven’t identified.”
According to Rohrabacher, a primary lack of attention is in for the Arecibo, Puerto Rico funding for next year—a radio telescope which hunts near-Earth objects. In order to deflect a potential killer asteroid, scientists need to study more identification processes, with a variety of possible solutions theorized by scientists:
• Using a nuclear weapon to blow it up
• Sending a spacecraft that would use gravity to drag the object off its destructive path
This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
