Astronauts recently revealed just how often asteroids strike the Earth.
The researchers announced in a press conference at the Seattle Museum of Flight that 26 explosions had been detected between the years of 2000 and 2013, a B612 Foundation news release reported.
The asteroid-caused explosions ranged in power from one to 100 kilotons; the Hiroshima atomic bomb had an energy impact of 15 kilotons.
Most of these asteroids exploded extremely high in Earth's atmosphere and did not cause any serious damage, but the research could help scientists better-estimate the "frequency of a potential "city-killer-size" asteroid," the news release reported.
The largest known asteroid impact in modern time was over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 and had an energy impact between five and 15 megatons. In 2013 an explosion occurred over Chelyabinsk, Russia, which had an impact of 600 kilotons. Neither of these impacts were detected prior to the event.
"While most large asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire country or continent have been detected, less than 10,000 of the more than a million dangerous asteroids with the potential to destroy an entire major metropolitan area have been found by all existing space or terrestrially-operated observatories," Doctor Ed Lu, former US Shuttle and Soyuz Astronaut and co-founder and CEO of the B612 Foundation, said in the news release.
"Because we don't know where or when the next major impact will occur, the only thing preventing a catastrophe from a 'city-killer' sized asteroid has been blind luck," he said.
The B612 Foundation plans to build a Sentinel Space Telescope Mission that would track these "city-killer" asteroids years before they would have a chance to hit Earth; this would buy scientists a few years to make a plan for deflection.
The B612 Sentinel Mission will also create "the first comprehensive dynamic map of our inner solar system," the news release reported. This would provide insight into asteroid trajectories and when Earth would cross them.
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