016.4 Hunting Killer Asteroids

The main effort for now is devoted to finding all of the 1000m or larger asteroids in near-Earth orbits. The current goal is to find 90% of these objects within the next ten years.

Because these objects come near the Earth many times, their orbits can be determined precisely.

What happens when an astronomer finds an asteroid on a collision course with Earth?

The degree of hazard that the object presents is presented as a number on the Torino Scale, the equivalent of the Richter Scale for earthquakes.

With luck, the collision will be ten to a hundred years in the future, leaving plenty of time to mount an international expedition to deflect it while that is easy to do.