Asteroids are rocky bodies that orbits the sun. A lot of these asteroids are located between Mars Jupiter in the asteroid belt. There are around 27,000 NEAs. This is a lot of near-earth asteroids but only 2000 of them according to NASA is considered to be a threat to Earth. The 2000 asteroid that are dangerously close to Earth can be both really dangerous and also helpful. The reason these asteroids can be really dangerous because the impact it creates the Earth can cause a lot of destruction. When a piece of the asteroid enters the Earth's atmosphere it becomes a meteor and these meteors travels at high speeds (up to 160,000 mph). These fast moving meteors can destroy large amounts of land and even humans and other species that live on the crash site. A notable meteor crash that happened 65 million years ago caused half of the species to die out from the large impact and amount of dust to spread in the atmosphere. Before craters are made a lot of dust is released into the atmosphere which blocks the sun destroying life. These are the bad reasons but there are also a lot of other good reasons to have these asteroids fragments crash to Earth because we can use these fragments to study. We can study the materials it is made up and use radioactive decay of these elements to figure out how old these asteroids are and the age of these asteroids will give us a lot of information on these asteroids and even the solar system. If we were to find a good piece of Asteroid in a few years we have to study it and see what it can reveal to us about the Solar System and how it was formed. The more samples we can get we can get a deeper understanding of Space and our Solar System.
NEAs are coming
Updated: Feb 24, 2023
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