NASA's Big Blind Spot In Tracking Dangerous Meteors & Asteroids

Our Cosmic Blind Spot: Threats From Above. The Earth has been left with a huge blind spot for potentially devastating comet strikes after the only dedicated comet-spotting program in the southern hemisphere lost its funding, leading astronomers have warned. The program, which discovered the Siding Spring comet that narrowly missed Mars on Sunday, was shut down last year after losing funding.

“It’s a real worry,” Bradley Tucker, an astronomer at the Australian National University (ANU) and University of California Berkeley, told Guardian Australia.

“There could be something hurtling towards us right now and we wouldn’t know about it.”

Russia's meteorite strike highlights the need for a global strategy to deal with dangerous asteroids. The Russian Academy of Sciences estimate the fireball that streaked over the Ural mountains weighed about 10 tons. The speed of entry was at least 54,000 kilometres per hour (33,000 mph) and it shattered about 30-50 kilometres (18-32 miles) above ground, showering meteorites that caused damage over a wide area.

The shockwave from the fireball's supersonic passage through the atmosphere broke windows and set off car alarms. The collision took place as the world waited for a close pass of asteroid 2012 DA14. According to the European Space Agency, no link between the two events is thought possible.

The Earth is regularly peppered with small, harmless asteroid impacts, but there's an estimated 13,000 giant asteroids, most of which we can't find yet, that could potentially release cataclysmic destruction on the planet.

Space is a vast, mainly empty expanse, but ours is most certainly not the only giant rock hurtling through it. Earth's orbit frequently crosses paths with asteroids of various sizes – NASA tracked some 556 atmospheric fireballs caused by meteorites between 1 and 20 meters in diameter over a 19-year period between 1994 and 2013.
Small asteroids that disintegrated in the atmosphere between 1994-2013

These were all harmless enough, and indeed the vast majority of near-Earth objects, or NEOs, that enter our atmosphere are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere without causing any problems. But there are plenty of bigger, faster and denser space rocks out there.

The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor exploded about 30 kilometers above the Earth's surface like a 500-kiloton bomb..

Back in 1903, the famous Tunguska impact happened, again over Russia although thankfully in a sparsely populated area. A meteor somewhere over 60 meters wide detonated over a forested area, flattening 80 million trees across some 2,000 square miles of forest. The blast shock, it's estimated, would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.

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