Washington: An asteroid or comet strike of “sufficient size” could mean the end of the world because the Earth is unprepared to defend itself against such an occurrence, a Nasa scientist has warned. The planet is overdue for an extinction-level event involving a giant space object — such as an asteroid or comet — following a number of close encounters over the last 20 years, Dr Joseph Nuth said.
Speaking at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in San Francisco Dr Nuth said that if a potentially dangerous object was on a crash-course with our planet “there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment”, according to The Guardian. He said: “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.”
Earth had a “close encounter” with a comet in 1996 and again in 2014, when one passed “within cosmic spitting distance of Mars”, he said.
Scientists had only 22 months’ warning time for the second pass, less than half the time currently needed to get a craft capable of deflecting such an object into space, Dr Nuth said. He recommended Nasa build an interceptor craft and keep it in storage in order to cut down on the time it takes to organise such a mission.
