Yesterday, as on many other occasions, an asteroid the "CL2" touched the Earth at a speed of 27 kilometers per hour, or 7,54 kilometers per second, a distance of 4 million kilometers. NASA calls them Neo - Near Earth Object.
At that distance they pose no danger to our planet. But at the end of 2018, we took a big risk. Il Giornale reports, in an article, of the impact in the atmosphere over the Bering Sea of an enormous space rock.
On December 18, a huge asteroid exploded in the Earth's atmosphere, releasing 10 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The explosion occurred on the Bering Sea between Russia and Alaska. The asteroid crossed the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 32 kilometers per second with a trajectory of 7 degrees. With 10 meters in diameter and 400 tons of mass, the space rock exploded about 25 kilometers above the earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons.
Lindley Jobnson of NASA reported that such an asteroid had not been seen for about 100 years. The space mass exploded not far from the routes of commercial flights. A similar explosion occurred in Siberia in 1908 and destroyed 80 million trees over an area of 200 square kilometers.
Military satellites also detected the explosion. Keliy Fast, manager of the near-Earth object observation program, points out a notable detail: "It was 40 percent of the energy released in Chelyabinsk, but it happened on the Bering Sea so it didn't have the same effect.. Fortunately, the Earth is mostly covered with water".
But you can't rely on chance because the event shows that larger objects can collide with the Earth without acceptable notice. In this regard, it is therefore advisable to implement space rock monitoring services.
Scientific technology, despite its limited resources, is moving to find solutions to these lethal dangers. A special telescope called NeoCam is under development, which could be launched at a gravitational equilibrium point in space where it should evaluate dangerous asteroids in time.