Tally of known near-Earth asteroids and comets hits 15,000

[Binary_Bark]

Tally of known near-Earth asteroids and comets hits 15,000

The international effort to find, confirm and catalogue the multitude of asteroids that pose a threat to our planet has reached a milestone: 15 000 discovered – with many more to go.

The number of catalogued asteroids approaching Earth has grown rapidly since the count reached 10 000 only three years ago.

Near-Earth objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres whose orbits come close to ours, meaning they could hit our planet.

The discovered NEOs are part of a much larger population of more than 700 000 known asteroids in our Solar System.

“The rate of discovery has been high in the past few years, and teams worldwide have been discovering on average 30 new ones per week,” says Ettore Perozzi, manager of the NEO Coordination Centre at ESA’s centre near Rome, Italy.

“A few decades back, 30 were found in a typical year, so international efforts are starting to pay off. We believe that 90% of objects larger than 1000 m have been discovered, but – even with the recent milestone – we’ve only found just 10% of the 100 m NEOs and less than 1% of the 40 m ones.”

Today, the two main discovery efforts are in the US: the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, and the Pan-STARRS project in Hawaii, jointly accounting for about 90% of the new bodies found.

 

[OCP]

The most important piece if information is missing - when will one of these asteroids hit nkandla?

 

[AlphaJohn]

The question is not if we ever gonna get get hit by a big one, its when:



Source: http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html