The dinosaurs were unprepared to meet their asteroid-maker, but it seems all these years later and humans are no better equipped to handle a potentially deadly fireball either.
This week, scientist Joseph Nuth, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, warned that earth is totally unprepared to defend itself against impact from foreign objects from space.
Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, Nuth said: “The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” according to The Guardian.
Despite the NASA planetary defence office having been established – with the aim to observe the skies for possible asteroid strikes – this will supposedly not give us a large enough window to begin a preventative mission.
In fact, it takes years to complete a ‘deflection’ operation – five to launch a spacecraft - and the most recent ‘near miss’ with Mars in 2014 was only noticed 22 months before impact.
Admittedly there is a very low chance of an earth impact in the next 100 years, approximately 0.01% according to NASA themselves, but Nuth said: “On the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially.
“You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point.”
The current plan of action is mass evacuation, but Nuth recommend that NASA build an interceptor rocket with periodic testing, alongside an observer spacecraft to stop catastrophic fireballs from hitting us.
However even if we were able to cut the action time in half, Nuth still says this would be a “hail-mary pass”.
Back in August, NASA sent a probe to an asteroid, Bennu, that could one day hit Earth and bring about our downfall.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, Principal Investigator Dante Lauretta confirmed that in 2135 its believed Bannu will pass between the Earth and the moon, and could potentially leave a wake of destruction.