The asteroid that exploded near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in February really hammered home the need for us to be prepared for the possibility of a more disastrous collision.
Luckily, a gathering of scientists, engineers, and policymakers from around the world will be meeting on Monday in an effort to come up with initiatives to protect the planet in the event of a larger asteroid impact. They're calling the event the "Planetary Defense Conference," and frankly, that's a pretty cool name.
The conference will be held at a desert compound in Flagstaff, Arizona.
"People all over the world have really now seen what happens when as asteroid hits the Earth and it's very visceral. You can understand it. 'I've seen this thing in the sky and the explosion' and so on and there's a lot of attention now," said David Trilling, Assistant Professor at Northern Arizona University's Physics and Astronomy Department.
Speaking to the House Science, Space and Technology Committee last week, former NASA astronaut Ed Lu stated that the threat of a disastrous asteroid impact is very real.
"We simply do not know when the next catastrophic asteroid impact will be, because we have not yet tracked the great majority of asteroids," Lu said.
Lu added that the technology to deflect asteroids away from the planet exists, but can not be used unless we actually know where the asteroid is to begin with.
"Most troubling to me is the fact that of the up to 20,000 asteroids that could be labeled as 'city destroyers', we have identified only 10 percent. And we are unlikely to have the means to detect 90 percent until 2030," Lu said in a statement.
One can hope that the Planetary Defense Conference will be more than a cool name, and will actually result in some practical ideas for tracking and deflecting dangerous asteroids.
The conference's discussions will be available to view via a live stream.
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