Tag Archives: hazardous

Hurricane Lee, now a Category 3 storm, is starting to send hazardous beach conditions to Southeast US, forecasters say – CNN

  1. Hurricane Lee, now a Category 3 storm, is starting to send hazardous beach conditions to Southeast US, forecasters say CNN
  2. Tropics Update: Hurricane Lee back to major hurricane status, could eventually impact New England 13News Now
  3. Lee Restrengthens Into A Major Hurricane; Track Forecast Remains Uncertain The Weather Channel
  4. Hurricane Lee restrengthens to Category 3 as East Coast faces hazardous beach conditions this week CNN
  5. Why Hurricane Lee’s rapid intensification has meteorologists and climate scientists worried MSNBC
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Read original article here

Potentially hazardous asteroid spotted by NASA, UW scanner in Hawaii – USA TODAY

  1. Potentially hazardous asteroid spotted by NASA, UW scanner in Hawaii USA TODAY
  2. Near-Earth “Potentially Hazardous” Asteroid Discovered: First Triumph for HelioLinc3D Algorithm SciTechDaily
  3. New algorithm spots its first “potentially hazardous” near-Earth asteroid — and it’s 600 feet long CBS News
  4. ‘Potentially hazardous’ 600-foot asteroid detected near Earth after a year of hiding in plain sight Livescience.com
  5. Algorithm designed to identify asteroids discovers potentially hazardous 600-foot object during test run TechSpot
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Read original article here

New algorithm spots its first “potentially hazardous” near-Earth asteroid — and it’s 600 feet long – CBS News

  1. New algorithm spots its first “potentially hazardous” near-Earth asteroid — and it’s 600 feet long CBS News
  2. Near-Earth “Potentially Hazardous” Asteroid Discovered: First Triumph for HelioLinc3D Algorithm SciTechDaily
  3. Groundbreaking Algorithm Successfully Identifies First ‘Potentially Hazardous Asteroid’ The Debrief
  4. Algorithm designed to identify asteroids discovers potentially hazardous 600-foot object during test run TechSpot
  5. New Algorithm Spots ‘Potentially Hazardous’ 600-Foot Asteroid Gizmodo
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Read original article here

‘Potentially hazardous’ asteroid that recently zipped past Earth is an elongated weirdo with an odd rotation – Livescience.com

  1. ‘Potentially hazardous’ asteroid that recently zipped past Earth is an elongated weirdo with an odd rotation Livescience.com
  2. Oddly shaped asteroid once considered an impact risk for Earth races past the planet Space.com
  3. Curious ‘Oblong’ Object Detected on Radar Was Closely Tracked by NASA, Officials Say The Debrief
  4. This oblong asteroid will have a close encounter with Earth in 2040 Interesting Engineering
  5. Asteroid Nearly Three Times the Length of Statue of Unity Flew Past Us! | Weather.com The Weather Channel
  6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Read original article here

White House declares ‘major disaster’ in California; hazardous roads plague Sierra, Bay Area

President Biden approved California’s request for a major disaster declaration to increase federal emergency support as storms and flooding continued to flog communities across the state over the weekend. Hazardous roadways plagued several areas Sunday, with home-bound Sierra travelers warned of near-impossible conditions on some roadways and Bay Area motorists dealing with closures forced by floods and landslides.

“California is grateful for President Biden’s swift approval of this critical support to communities reeling from these ongoing storms,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said after meeting with evacuated residents in Merced County on Saturday. The declaration will unlock more federal funding to help local and state storm response efforts and will make funding available to affected individuals in hard-hit Merced, Sacramento and Santa Cruz counties.

In the Bay Area, residents on Sunday assessed damage from the widespread flooding, wind and landslides that submerged roadways and felled trees — leaving at least one dead, a woman found beneath a tree branch in Golden Gate Park, according to officials. A National Weather Service flood advisory was in effect until 9 a.m. Monday for Bay Area shoreline and North Bay interior areas.

The storms showed signs of tapering off in the Bay Area, but not before another round of moderate rain showers was expected to blow through already waterlogged areas Monday.More than 2,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers around the region were without power Sunday afternoon, according to the company. Most of the outages were in San Francisco, the Peninsula and the South Bay.

As the rain picked up Sunday, officials in San Benito County issued a new evacuation order for a swath of the northern section of the county outside Hollister. Citing “severe flooding,” county officials told everyone on San Felipe Road north of Highway 156 as well as people in the Lovers Lane, Lake Road, Dunneville Estates and Shore Road areas to leave.

Just across the county border in Santa Clara County, officials expanded an evacuation warning there to include the Bloomfield Avenue area south of Gilroy. The county said two levee breaches in San Benito County may cause water to encroach into Santa Clara County.

Coastal rivers continued to see heightened risk of flooding that threatened to swamp more homes and overtake roadways already buckling on sodden earth. In Sonoma County, the banks of the Russian River were swelled to capacity Sunday, with water levels expected to recede slowly throughout the day Monday. In Monterey County, the Salinas River remained below flood stage over the weekend after peaking Friday at 24.6 feet — about 1½ feet above flood stage. The river is expected to rise again this week, but Sunday’s forecast showed it remaining just below minor flood level.

For people heading south, a new landslide toppled onto Highway 1 south of Mill Creek on the Big Sur Coast, Caltrans reported Sunday, as crews continued to address “significant instability” in several locations on the coastal road.

Forecasters warned of strong winds in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties, where gusts were expected to blow unsecured objects and tree limbs into drivers’ paths.

High tides and flooding kept a portion of Highway 37 in Novato closed Sunday with no estimated time of reopening the section between Highway 101 and Atherton Avenue that was closed after Novato Creek overflowed a levee, according to Caltrans.

A winter storm warning was issued Sunday in the Sierra Nevada until at least 10 p.m. Monday, with the National Weather Service cautioning that driving could be “very difficult to impossible” because of expected heavy snowfall at high elevations. Between 3 and 5 inches of snow was forecast for lower elevations from Yosemite to Tulare counties, with hazardous driving conditions expected to prevail into Monday.

Eastbound traffic on Interstate 80 heading to Tahoe was being turned around at Nyack Road, Caltrans said Sunday night, “due multiple vehicle spinouts over the Donner Summit.” The agency tweeted, “It’s unknown when the highway will reopen.”

Traffic snaked along Interstate 50, which remained open Sunday from South Tahoe to Sacramento, with chains required for a short section south of the Lake Tahoe basin.

Forecasters encouraged motorists heading down from the Sierra to wait until Tuesday at the earliest for safety on mountain roads.

Those returning should expect delays and plan for the worst by traveling with an emergency kit of extra food, water and clothing, weather service meteorologist Hannah Chandler-Cooley said.

Travel conditions in the Sierra, already poor, were likely “to deteriorate rapidly” as heavy snow covered the ridges overnight Sunday, Chandler-Cooley said, adding that the weather service was “highly discouraging mountain travel“ throughout the holiday weekend.

Snowy sheets were expected to blanket areas south of Tahoe throughout Monday, complicating travel for Bay Area drivers heading down. Road conditions could “remain poor for a while” as Caltrans crews clear roadways, Chandler-Cooley said.

East of Tahoe from Truckee to Baxter (Placer County), chains or snow tires were required on all cars over the roughly 40-mile stretch.

Just south of the Caltrans chain control area, at Ikeda’s California Country Market in Auburn, Derek Ikeda was busy Sunday preparing homemade Dutch apple and chicken pot pies for weekend travelers. But he expected fewer than usual, with storms keeping some of his usual holiday weekend customers at home.

But the forecasts did not dissuade all skiers, he said. “They say, ‘We found a gap in the weather, we are going to shoot for it,’” Ikeda said Sunday afternoon. “They keep coming through the rain and the snow.” Heavenly Valley said it was trying to dig out from the heavy snows but tweeted Saturday that conditions were “well beyond operating parameters all day” as it was “hit with another heavy round of high winds and snow” still piling up.

With wet weather and slippery roadways threatening drivers throughout the Bay Area, improvement was not expected until midweek, said National Weather Service meteorologist Colby Goatley. Highway 84 remained closed between Fremont and Sunol because of a landslide, with Caltrans anticipating road repairs to be completed by Monday evening.

The good news, Goatley said, is that the coming days are predicted to bring a reprieve, with improved road conditions by the week’s end.

“Everyone is tired of the rain,” he said, “but after one more round, we should get some sunny skies in the forecast.”


Nora Mishanec and J.D. Morris are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: nora.mishanec@sfchronicle.com jd.morris@sfchronicle.com



Read original article here

Hazardous outlook for this week

National Weather Service officials posted a Hazardous Weather Outlook early Tuesday morning for portions of north central and northeast Illinois, and northwest Indiana, as a deepening low pressure system approaches, and a polar vortex was expected to follow mid-next week, officials said.

Much of the central United States, from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest, was braced Tuesday for blizzard-like conditions, while states farther south saw tornado warnings from a massive storm blowing across the country. An area stretching from Montana into western Nebraska and Colorado was under blizzard warnings, and the National Weather Service said that as much as 2 feet of snow was possible in some areas of western South Dakota and northwestern Nebraska.

Meanwhile, ice and sleet were expected in the eastern Great Plains. The National Weather Service warned that up to half an inch of ice could form and winds could gust up to 45 mph in parts of Iowa, Minnesota and South Dakota.

A significant Arctic blast was expected to move into the Plains and Midwest next week.

The last polar vortex in the area happened January 2019. In Chicago, the polar vortex produced the coldest-ever temperatures for Jan. 30 and Jan. 31, but it did not break the area’s all-time coldest temperature — minus 27 — set in 1985.

Winds will gust to 40 mph through Wednesday morning. Another round of widespread rainfall will develop Wednesday evening. Some of this rain will be locally heavy, which may result in a few instances of flooding of low-lying areas and river rises into the end of the week, weather officials said.

Current temperatures at Midway Airport registered at 36 degrees.

The forecast was mostly cloudy, with a high near 42.

The Associated Press contributed

Read original article here

A skyscraper-sized ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid will zip through Earth’s orbit on Halloween

A newly discovered, “potentially hazardous” asteroid almost the size of the world’s tallest skyscraper is set to tumble past Earth just in time for Halloween, according to NASA.

The asteroid, called 2022 RM4, has an estimated diameter of between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) — just under the height of Dubai’s 2,716-foot-tall (828 m) Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. It will zoom past our planet at around 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound, according to NASA (opens in new tab).

At its closest approach on Nov. 1, the asteroid will come within about 1.43 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) of Earth, around six times the average distance between Earth and the moon. By cosmic standards, this is a very slender margin.

Related: Why are asteroids and comets such weird shapes? (opens in new tab)

NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a “near-Earth object” and classifies any large body within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet as “potentially hazardous.” Once flagged, these potential threats are closely watched by astronomers, who study them with radar for signs of any deviation from their predicted trajectories that could put them on a devastating collision course with Earth. 

See more

NASA tracks the locations and orbits of roughly 28,000 asteroids, pinpointing them with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — an array of four telescopes able to perform a total scan of the entire night sky every 24 hours.

Since ATLAS was brought online in 2017, it has spotted more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth, the former exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the latter crash-landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn’t cause any damage.

NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century. The good news is that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA (opens in new tab).

Related: 8 ways to stop an asteroid: Nuclear weapons, paint and Bruce Willis

But this doesn’t mean that astronomers think they should stop looking. Though the majority of near-Earth objects may not be civilization-ending, such as the planet-busting comet in the 2021 satirical disaster movie “Don’t Look Up,” there are plenty of devastating asteroid impacts in recent history to justify the continued vigilance.

For instance, in March 2021, a bowling ball-size meteor exploded over Vermont (opens in new tab) with the force of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT. In 2013, a meteor that exploded in the atmosphere above the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk generated a blast roughly equal to around 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb (opens in new tab). During the 2013 explosion, fireballs rained down over the city and its environs, damaging buildings, smashing windows and injuring approximately 1,500 people.

If astronomers were to ever spy a dangerous asteroid headed our way, space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect it. On Sept. 26, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft redirected the non-hazardous asteroid Dimorphos by ramming it off course (opens in new tab), altering the asteroid’s orbit by 32 minutes in the first test of Earth’s planetary defense system.

China has also suggested (opens in new tab) it is in the early planning stages of an asteroid-redirect mission. By slamming 23 Long March 5 rockets into the asteroid Bennu, which is set to swing within 4.6 million miles (7.4 million km) of Earth’s orbit between the years 2175 and 2199, the country hopes to divert the space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with our planet.

Originally published on Live Science.



Read original article here

Rare dark-streaked meteorites may come from a ‘potentially hazardous’ asteroid

Strange, dark-veined meteorites rained down on Earth when a fireball exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013. The origin of these unusual meteorites has remained a mystery, but now, planetary scientists have discovered a possible source: a mile-and-a-half-long near-Earth asteroid.

Scientists know that the dark streaks across the Chelyabinsk meteorites are caused by a process called shock darkening. Yet only around 2% of a common type of meteorite called chondrite meteorites show signs of shock darkening, and the source of these space rocks has remained a mystery.

Now, scientists have identified the asteroid 1998 OR2 as a potential source of shock-darkened meteorites. The near-Earth asteroid was discovered in July 1998 by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Its last close approach to Earth was in April 2020, when the space rock passed within 3.9 million miles (6.3 million kilometers) of our planet.

Related: Mile-long asteroid 1998 OR2 dons ‘mask’ before Earth flyby (photos)

Although that may not seem very close, NASA still considers 1998 OR2 “potentially hazardous” because changes to the asteroid’s orbit over the next 1,000 years could make it a risk to Earth.

Meteorites are created when pieces of an asteroid like 1998 OR2 break away and enter Earth’s atmosphere. The discovery that shock-darkened meteorites can originate from a near-Earth asteroid hints at the varying material strength of asteroids and has implications for protecting Earth against a potential impact, the researchers said.

“Shock darkening is an alteration process caused when something impacts a planetary body hard enough that the temperatures partially or fully melt those rocks and alter their appearance both to the human eye and in our data,” Adam Battle, a graduate student in planetary science at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study, said in a statement (opens in new tab). “This process has been seen in meteorites many times but has only been seen on asteroids in one or two cases way out in the main asteroid belt, which is found between Mars and Jupiter.”

Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new study who detected shock darkening on these main-belt asteroids, said that it’s a much more common phenomenon on asteroids than meteorites. “Impacts are very common in asteroids and any solid body in the solar system because we see impact craters on these objects from spacecraft images,” he said in the statement. “But impact melt and shock-darkening effects on meteorites derived from these bodies are rare.”

Reddy, who co-leads the Space Domain Awareness lab at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, added that finding a near-Earth asteroid dominated by this process has implications for impact hazard assessment. 

“Adam [Battle]’s work has shown that ordinary chondrite asteroids can appear as carbonaceous in our classification tools if they are affected by shock darkening,” Reddy said. “These two materials have different physical strengths, which is important when trying to deflect a hazardous asteroid.”

Is asteroid 1998 OR2 chondrite or carbonaceous? 

Reddy, Battle and their team used the Rapid Astronomical Pointing Telescopes for Optical Reflectance Spectroscopy (RAPTORS) atop the Kuiper Space Sciences Building on the University of Arizona campus to observe the asteroid 1998 OR2.

The team collected data on 1998 OR2’s surface composition, with the asteroid visually appearing as an ordinary chondrite asteroid, a type of space rock that is light in color and contains the minerals olivine and pyroxene. But an asteroid classification tool determined that 1998 OR2 appeared to be a carbonaceous asteroid ; these space rocks are dark and featureless compared with chondrite asteroids.

The team then set about investigating the reason for this discrepancy and determining the correct classification.

“The mismatch was one of the early things that got the project going to investigate potential causes for the discrepancy,” Battle said.

They eliminated the possibility that exposure to the space environment had caused changes in the asteroid’s surface, as this process, called space weathering, would have left the space rock slightly reddened. 

The team concluded that shock darkening was responsible for the disparity between the two analysis methods, because the shock darkening process can obscure olivine and pyroxene while darkening the asteroid’s surface, thus making it look like a carbonaceous asteroid.

“The asteroid is not a mixture of ordinary chondrite and carbonaceous asteroids, but rather it is definitely an ordinary chondrite, based on its mineralogy, which has been altered — likely through the shock darkening process — to look like a carbonaceous asteroid to the classification tool,” Battle said.

Shock darkening of asteroids was first theorized in the late 20th century but wasn’t an intense area of study until the 2013 Chelyabinsk fireball seeded Earth with shock-darkened meteorites.

Interest in shock darkening grew after Reddy found asteroids affected by the process in the main asteroid belt. This new discovery showing evidence of the process in a near-Earth asteroid could further increase interest in shock darkening, the team said.

The research was published Oct. 4 in The Planetary Science Journal and presented at a conference held this week by the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences..

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.  



Read original article here

Mosquito Fire: Smoke begins creating unhealthy to hazardous conditions in Northern California

The smoke’s impact was most visually clear in a time-lapse video posted by the NWS in Reno, Nevada. The video was taken from inside the NWS Reno office and shows the smoke from the Mosquito Fire in California flowing into the area over about one to two hours on Sunday, said meteorologist Heather Richards.

The smoke, which has created unhealthy to hazardous air quality, is expected to linger in the Tahoe Basin and Reno area through Monday, the weather service said.

“It smells really smoky. It looks really hazy. There’s not an ounce of blue in the sky,” Pam Malone of Folsom, a city within the parameters of the fire, told CNN affiliate KCRA-TV. Malone told the affiliate she was limiting her time outdoors because of the unhealthy air quality.
The rapidly growing blaze, which started September 6, is currently the largest fire burning in the state and only 10% contained. It had already consumed 46,587 acres in both El Dorado and Placer counties as of Monday, according to Cal Fire.
Nationwide, 92 active large wildland fires have torched nearly 728,000 acres — the majority of them burning in northwestern states, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
Sweltering under rising temperatures, drought-ravaged Western states have become hotbeds of thirsty, dry brush that can fuel more volatile wildfires that burn hotter and for longer.

As numerous fires ravaged Western states, air quality alerts were in place across much of Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

Skies turned orange and hazy in parts of Oregon over the weekend as winds carried smoke from the multiple fires burning in the state.

The smoke was so thick in Washington that it blocked some solar radiation and created temperatures that were lower than anticipated, according to the NWS in Spokane.
Smoke can irritate the eyes and lungs and worsen some medical conditions. Those facing the highest risk are infants and young children, people with heart or lung disease, older adults and pregnant people. Many residents were told to stay inside if possible, keep windows and doors closed and avoid strenuous outdoor activity.
Recent studies have shown that being exposed to both extreme heat and wildfire smoke at the same time can worsen the health risks, and that’s expected to become more of a threat, UCLA researchers said in a study published last month.

“Rising global temperatures and more frequent extreme heat events are expected to increase wildfire size and intensity, signaling a growing public health threat from concurrent heat-smoke exposure,” researchers wrote.

Where the fires are burning

In Oregon — which had 19 active wildfires Monday, according to the Oregon Department of Emergency Management — containment of the Cedar Creek Fire dropped from 12% to 0% as the fire exploded in size over the weekend, now swallowing more than 86,000 acres in very steep and difficult to access terrain. A lightning storm August 1 sparked the fire.

Driven by strong easterly winds, triple-digit temperatures and dry fuels, flames breached containment lines that firefighters have for weeks worked to build.

Evacuations were ordered in Lane and Deschutes counties as the fire advanced, making wind-driven runs and threatening 2,230 homes and 443 commercial structures.

On Sunday, fire officials said extreme weather from the past two days was easing, temperatures have started to cool and shifting winds have calmed.

However, the blaze was still expected to advance through heavy fuels, officials said.

As wildfires tore through the parched lands, Oregonians were also contending with power shutoffs. Thousands of customers in Oregon, including those in the suburbs of Portland, were without power for part of the weekend as Pacific Power implemented Public Safety Power Shutoffs to reduce wildfire risk as winds picked up.
In Washington, where 16 fires were active Monday, the National Weather service warned of hazardous air quality in several areas across the state through Monday.
In California, residents saw both record rainfall and record heat in the same week, as what used to be Tropical Storm Kay made a rare close pass to the state amid a record-breaking heat wave.
The lingering showers brought isolated flooding to some parts of Southern California, but also helped firefighters. Aided by ample moisture, rainfall and cooler temperatures, crews battling the Fairview Fire managed to shore up containment of the 28,307-acre blaze to 53% by Monday.
The fire — which broke out last Monday in Riverside County and grew quickly — has killed two civilians and injured a third, destroyed 35 buildings and forced thousands to evacuate, according to Cal Fire.

On Saturday, a pilot and two fire personnel were injured when a helicopter assigned to the Fairview Fire crashed in a residential backyard while attempting to land at a local airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Some evacuation orders were reduced to warnings Sunday as scattered showers slowed the fire’s spread, officials said. Full containment of the blaze was expected by Saturday, according to Cal Fire.
In Idaho, the Moose Fire, about 17 miles north of the town of Salmon, was 125,925 acres Monday with 37% containment, according to Inciweb, a clearinghouse for US fire information. Dry and unstable conditions and potential gusty winds over the next day could increase fire behavior, officials said.

The California and Nevada National Guard has sent two C-130 aircraft “equipped with modular airborne fire fighting systems,” to Idaho to combat the ongoing wildfires in the state, a release from the National Guard said Monday. The modular airborne fire fighting systems on the planes can “drop up to 3,000 gallons of fire retardant in less than 10 seconds across a quarter-mile line,” the National Guard said.

The aircraft and crews arrived at Boise Airport on Friday and were requested by the National Interagency Fire Center.

There was marginal risk for excessive rainfall through the overnight hours for parts of Southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Monday, the moisture in Southern California is forecast to spread to the north, bringing rain to northwest Arizona before heading into Nevada by Tuesday. A flood watch is already in effect for eastern Nevada from Tuesday through Wednesday night, CNN Meteorologist Robert Shackelford said.

Meanwhile, isolated dry storms are possible for northern Nevada Monday, which could spark new fires in that area, according to Shackelford. Also, eastern Montana is expected to see elevated fire weather risk due to 15 mph winds and very dry air.

CNN’s Tina Burnside, Michelle Watson and Eric Levenson contributed to this report.



Read original article here

A ‘potentially hazardous’ blue-whale-size asteroid will zip through Earth’s orbit on Friday

A “potentially hazardous” asteroid the size of a blue whale is set to zip past Earth on Friday (Aug. 12), according to NASA (opens in new tab).

The asteroid, named 2015 FF, has an estimated diameter between 42 and 92 feet (13 and 28 meters), or about the body length of an adult blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), and it will zoom past the Earth at 20,512 mph (33,012 km/h).

At its closest approach, the asteroid — traveling at around than 27 times the speed of sound — will come within about 2.67 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) of Earth, a little more than eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon. By cosmic standards, this is a tiny margin.

Related: Why are asteroids and comets such weird shapes?

NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a “near-Earth object” and any fast-moving object within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) is categorized as “potentially hazardous.” Once the objects are flagged, astronomers closely monitor them, looking for any deviation from their predicted trajectories — such as an unexpected bounce off another asteroid — that could put them on a devastating collision course with Earth.  

NASA knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000 asteroids, which it maps with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — an array of four telescopes capable of performing a complete scan of the entire night sky once every 24 hours. Since ATLAS came online in 2017, it has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth, the former exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the latter landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn’t cause any damage. 

NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century, and the good news is that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.

But this doesn’t mean that space watchers think they should stop looking. Though the majority of near-Earth objects may not be civilization-ending, like the cataclysmic comet that appears in the 2021 satirical disaster movie “Don’t Look Up,” there are still plenty of devastating asteroid impacts in recent history to justify the continued vigilance.

In March 2021, a bowling ball-sized meteor exploded over Vermont with the force of 440 pounds (200 kilograms) of TNT, Live Science previously reported. Those fireworks, however, have nothing on the most explosive recent meteor event, which occurred near the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. As the Chelyabinsk meteor struck the atmosphere, it generated a blast roughly equal to around 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. Fireballs rained down over the city and its environs, damaging buildings, smashing windows and injuring approximately 1,200 people.

If astronomers were to ever spy an asteroid careening straight toward our planet, space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect the object. On Nov. 24, 2021, NASA launched a spacecraft as a part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which plans to redirect the non-hazardous asteroid Dimorphos by ramming it off course in autumn 2022, Live Science previously reported. China is also in the early planning stages of an asteroid-redirect mission. By slamming 23 Long March 5 rockets into the asteroid Bennu, the country hopes to divert the space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with Earth.

Originally published on Live Science.

Read original article here