NASA Maps Potential Asteroid Impacts

From the printed page to the silver screen, pop culture has made us aware of the threat of an asteroid impacting our planet.

Earlier this week, NASA released a new map that plots every potentially dangerous asteroid that could impact the Earth in the near future.   Posted on the online Planetary Photojournal overseen by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the map details the orbital path of 1400 asteroids that could come close enough to our planet to make an impact.

Now for a bit of good news.   The map shows that none of those 1400 asteroids will come close to impacting our planet for the next hundred years.

These are the asteroids considered hazardous because they are fairly large (at least 460 feet or 140 meters in size), and because they follow orbits that pass close to the Earth’s orbit (within 4.7 million miles or 7.5 million kilometers),” NASA officials explained in the image description.

The asteroid map shows a dizzying swarm of overlapping blue ellipses (the asteroid orbits) surrounding the sun. The orbits of Earth, Venus, Mercury, Mars and Jupiter are also visible to put the asteroid orbits in perspective on a solar system-wide scale.

And just because the asteroids are detailed on the map, it doesn’t mean that will hit our planet. The chart is intended to show asteroids that could impact our planet and not ones that necessarily will. These asteroids are classified by the space agency as “potentially hazardous.”

According to NASA, “being classified as a PHA does not mean that an asteroid will impact the Earth: None of these PHAs is a worrisome threat over the next 100 years. By continuing to observe and track these asteroids, their orbits can be refined and more precise predictions made of their future close approaches and impact probabilities.”

NASA scientists and astronomers around the world are constantly searching for asteroids that may pose an impact threat to Earth. NASA has said that roughly 95 percent of the largest asteroids that could endanger Earth — space rocks at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide — have been identified through these surveys.

Source: SPACE.com: NASA Maps Dangerous Asteroids That May Threaten Earth (Photos)