Asteroids and FEMA

Asteroids inhabit our Solar System in bands and in small areas.  Some have their own satellites or moons and so many follow a specific orbit.  Many are seen once but their orbit is so large they appear when a different generation is watching the skies.

Today, I attended a talk on asteroids where the first half of the talk was devoted to explaining all sorts of things associated with asteroids.  Of course, there is a ton of math involved in this whole topic because scientists want to know when an asteroid is likely to hit the earth.

This has lead to FEMA developing emergency plans should we be hit by an asteroid.  In addition, scientists are working on creating plans to move or destroy the asteroid.  If they change its course while it is passing near the earth so it cannot hit the earth, it could possibly hit it another time.  If they blow it up, there is all the rubble which could hit the earth or possibly assume a new orbit.  So now there are more orbits to keep track of.

There is lots of math involved in calculating orbits and orbital change so they can theoretically predict when paths will cross.  In addition, the are hoping they are putting in a rate of travel that is fairly accurate.  Apparently, one thing that happens is asteroids tend to crash into each other naturally breaking them up.

Scientists have been producing bar graphs of things such as sizes of the asteroids which hit the earth and the results have been used to calculate the probabilities of asteroids of certain sizes hitting the earth.  The chances of an asteroid that has a diameter of more than 1 km hitting the earth works out to us being safe for the next 250 years.

I wish you all could have heard the talk.  It was fascinating.  Let me know what you think, I would love to hear.