How likely is it for your hometown to be hit be an asteroid? While NASA's Fireball and Bolide Reports system can detect asteroids making their way for Earth, the agency has yet to come up with a system that can calculate the likelihood of specific areas being hit with interstellar debris.
Astronomers can use an asteroid's size, angular velocity and composition to approximate what would happen when it hits the Earth, but not where it will hit, although the most likely location is an ocean.
"Just over 70 percent of Earth's surface is ocean, which means about 70 percent of the impactors will land in water," said William Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
In the recent years, near-Earth objects (NEOs) have come dangerously close to harming humans, which prompted NASA to create the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), a division dedicated to detecting and tracking these objects in order to devise appropriate safety measures.
Now, the agency hopes to determine if asteroids hit Earth in a random manner and further our understanding of NEOs and the potential danger that they pose to the planet. While it may seem unlikely for an asteroid to collide with our planet, in the off chance that one did, it could lead to an extinction-level event.
NASA released a plot back in 2014 that revealed the seemingly random nature of impact events; they are not more likely to land at the equator than another location farther away, such as a pole.
"No pattern discernible, as you can see from this plot released by NASA in November of 2014," Cooke said. "Looks pretty random."
Many meteoric events go unreported, especially when in isolated areas, leading NASA to believe that new technologies need to focus on non-human ways of keeping watch on these events.
"We are just now beginning to establish networks that don't rely on human feedback to extract information about fireballs," Cooke said.
NASA's fireball program currently relies on cameras, but "coverage is nowhere near what we need," according to Cooke.
When the program is at the level that NASA desires, their tracking efforts will focus on the bigger, potentially dangerous objects, as opposed to the smaller ones that are more likely to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere before they do any damage.
"They are too hard to detect ahead of impacting Earth's atmosphere, and almost never do any damage - Chelyabinsk being a notable exception," said Lindley Johnson, lead program executive at the PDCO.
