Breaking down the mostly real science behind 'Don't Look Up'
, whose remit is to scan the skies to discover and catalogue potentially menacing space rocks long before they can reach Earth, and help the government coordinate a response, either by deflecting or destroying the object. In the case of comets, there might be only so much time to muster a defense. Agglomerations of ice and rock that come barrelling towards us from beyond the orbit of Pluto, comets whip around the sun and then fly back out—moving at speeds that can top 70 km/sec .
When it comes to asteroids, just what constitutes “significant size” is something of a judgment call. In 2013, aas the drag of the atmosphere essentially ripped the rock apart before it could reach the ground. The blast damaged 7,200 buildings and injured about 1,500 people—though claimed no lives. That was scary but survivable. The asteroids that concern the PDCO most—and get the majority of their attention—are those measuring 140 meters or more.
It’s not just size that makes a space rock a menace. It’s location, too. For a sufficiently large projectile to go from what NASA straightforwardly calls a near-Earth object to a potentially hazardous asteroid it must also intersect Earth’s orbit no further than 7.5 million km from the planet. That’s a whole lot of acreage by any common measure, but on the cosmic scale it’s a relatively near miss.
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