NASA Scientist: Earth Is Overdue For A Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Strike, Earth Woefully Unprepared

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A Nasa scientist warned on Monday that, humans are not prepared for a surprise asteroid or comet. He stated this at a presentation with nuclear scientists on how humans might deflect potential cosmic dangers towards Earth.

"The biggest problem, basically, is there is not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment," Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center said.

Speaking at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union, Nuth stated that large and potentially dangerous asteroids and comets are extremely rare, compared to the small objects that occasionally explode in Earth's sky or strike its surface.

He said but on the other hand, they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers are 50 to 60 million years apart. "You could say, of course, we are due, but it is a random course at that point," he added. Although, comets follow distant paths from Earth, they sometimes get knocked into the neighborhood.

Dr Nuth stated that Earth had a close encounter in 1996, when an aberrant comet flew into Jupiter, and also in 2014, when a comet passed within cosmic spitting distance of Mars, according to Business Insider.

The second comet was only discovered 22 months before its brush with a planet, not enough time to launch a deflection mission, had it been earth was its target destination.

Nasa recently established a planetary defense office and so Nuth recommended that an interceptor rocket should be built and kept in storage, with periodic testing, and also an observer spacecraft.

A rocket in storage and ready to launch within a year could mitigate the possibility of a sneaky asteroid coming in from a place that is hard to observe, like from the sun, he said.

 Nuth also noted that he and his co-authors do not speak for Nasa administrators, and the mission would require a request sent to Congress and also their approval.

Dr Cathy Plesko, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said there are two ways by which humans might deflect an asteroid, a nuclear warhead or a kinetic impactor, which is a giant cannonball.

"Cannonball technology is actually very good technology, intercepting an object at high speed actually ends up being more effective than high explosives".

Plesko said the calculations of a cannonball deflector would take far longer time to refine in comparison with the last resort pyrotechnics of a nuclear bomb. To "blow it to smithereens", would have dangerous side effects, including shrapnel from the blast, she added.

A massive fireball, believed to be 50-100m wide, flattened hundreds of square miles of a forest in Siberia, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in 1908. Windows were blown out more than 30 miles away, witnesses reported burns on their skin and also the charred remains of a herd of reindeer were found, according to The Guardian.

Scientists calculate that the so called Tunguska event was an explosion that is up to 185 times stronger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Nasa and the National Nuclear Security Administration have worked together on studying asteroids, for over a decade now.

In October this year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Nasa performed a simulation exercise of what might happen if a huge asteroid strikes near Los Angeles.

They estimated that if a 330-foot asteroid strikes southern California, the explosion would level cities and kill people in tens of thousands.