Asteroids - not for the faint-hearted

[lukebl]

You must watch this lovely animation showing an 'aerial' view of the solar system showing the locations of all the known asteroids starting in 1980. The asteroids increase incrementally as they are discovered. Compare 1980 with 2010.

It is beautiful but mighty scary. Watch out for the red ones (earth crossers)! Only a matter of time ....

[AndyH]

Lovely animation. Just shows how we have got better at detecting the small stuff.

Once it got to the 2000's................

:)Andy.

[Tutankhpip]

thats amazing. it looks like a cosmic washing machine

[martin_h]

It just goes to show how lucky we are not to have been hit.......yet!

[Space Oddity6]

Was reading Bill Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything recently and he made some interesting points about asteroids, saying that the detection of them is very hard, and if we were to be on the end of a direct hit, it would most likely come totally out the blue, just come crashing out of the sky. He also poo-pooed the idea of 'nuking' any that were detected and were on collision course with Earth, as 1) we don't have nukes that could manouvre in space and

2) even if we did find a way of sending something up, a nuke would essentially break it up into smaller pieces that would still cause as much if not more damage, like the Shoemaker Levy comet that hit Jupiter a few years back.

So yes, happy days!

[abumuhannadh]

i guess most of these are small rocks that would burn out in Earth's atmosphere?

[lukebl]

....just waiting for the descendants of the dinosaurs to look up and say 'Oh no, not again!'

[Meneldil]

That's a wonderful animation. It's a bit less alarming when you consider the exaggeration of scale - on the scale of the orbits, those asteroid markers must be 1000-10,000 miles wide, and the Earth circle at least a million miles wide.

[jinstan]

Agree with Meneldil, the possibility of crashing into earth is extremely low considering the size of the space between earth and the asteroid belt and the volume of the asteroids.