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Here are some of the considered NEOs that pose a threat to Earth in the Future.

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NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) web-site. Data related to Earth impact risk, close-approaches, and much more.

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There is no current threat to an asteroid strike right now, but there is no saying when an asteroid could become a threat. Below is one future threat, 99942 Apophis, which could strike in either 2029 or 2036.

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Nuclear winter (also known as atomic winter) is a Theoretical global climatic effect most often considered a potential threat following a counter value (or city-targeted) nuclear war as a result of city bombardment, natural wildfire firestorms, and asteroid strikes.

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Nuclear winter is the severe and prolonged global climatic cooling effect hypothesized to occur after widespread firestorms following a nuclear war. The hypothesis is based on the fact that such fires can inject soot into the stratosphere, where it can block some direct sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth.

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1. The asteroid would approach Earth, due to a collision or some other event.(possibly due to Earths gravity)
2. As it gets closer, friction from the Earth's atmosphere would cause the asteroid to heat up.
3. If the Asteroid survives the extreme heat, it will come barreling through the lower layers of the atmosphere, going very fast.
4. The asteroid would hit the surface with the power of multiple Nuclear Bombs, sending dust into the air and obliterating anything in the blast radius.
4 Con't. If the Asteroid were to impact over water, large tidal waves would spread around the Earth, larger than any tsunami ever known to man.
5. The force from the impact would create a crater, and the debris would slowly spread around the atmosphere, lowering solar efficiency, or blocking the sun out entirely, resulting in a nuclear winter. Some other effects would be acid rain, climate, and an increase in tectonic activity.

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If Doomsday Asteroids were to Hit Earth(full documentary)HD

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The Earth has been getting hit by asteroids and comets for its whole life. The planets formed from collisions of smaller objects, and even our water may have come largely from comets. Heavy bombardments may have continued until as recently as 4 billion years ago, making it difficult for life to get a foothold at all (the "Late Heavy Bombardment").

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Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. Some of these asteroids could be able to impact Earth.

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Kosmo has great interest in astronomical matters and belongs to the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society.

Astronomers watch for rocks that could collide with the Earth

Do you like living dangerously? Well, you don't have much choice. In the game of cosmic billiards, the cue ball is headed our way - sooner or later!

It's been theorized that an asteroid only a half-mile in diameter could destroy civilization on Earth, and hundreds of such rocks are out there in space, many of them crossing the Earth's orbit, perhaps right this minute.

In June 2011, a bus-sized chunk of real estate missed the Earth by only 7,500 miles. If this asteroid had hit the Earth, it would have blown a sizable crater in the ground, perhaps injuring or killing some hapless folks as well. And earlier in 2011, a somewhat smaller asteroid missed the Earth by only 3,400 miles!

Are you nervous yet? You should be. Everybody should. If a big enough rock hit the Earth, the climate could be disrupted so severely that plants wouldn't grow for years or even decades. Now there's food for thought!

Now let's look further into the subject of asteroids colliding with the Earth and see if there's something we can do about this potentially devastating possibility. Please read on.

Types of Asteroids

There are three types of asteroids. Main Belt Asteroids are the ones revolving around the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Theory has it these asteroids - millions of them, in fact - are the remnants of a protoplanetary disk that didn't quite come together as a planet. The largest such asteroid is Ceres, which is about 600 miles in diameter and considered a dwarf planet like Pluto. The second largest asteroid in the Belt is Vesta.

Trojan Asteroids follow planets around but rarely collide with them. The most common Trojans are the ones that follow Jupiter. There may be millions of these types of asteroids as well.

Near-Earth Asteroids (or NEA's) are the ones we should worry about. These potential killers have orbits that take them near the earth; some even cross the orbit of the planet. These are known as Earth-crossers. As of 2010, over 7,000 NEA's are known to exist, and as many as 1,000 of them could be as much as a kilometer (.62 miles) in diameter.

Any one of these NEA's could have the Earth's name on it. Of course, the ones we don't even know about may pose a much deadlier risk!

The Dinosaur Killer Asteroid and Others

About 65 million years ago an asteroid stuck the Earth that may have brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. (Some scientists think continental drift snuffed the dinos, but that's the subject of another article.) Scientists may have spotted the resultant hole in the ground, the so-called Chicxulub Crater just north of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

It's been estimated that this immense asteroid was six to 10 miles in diameter, roughly the size of Mt. Everest. When it landed in the ocean, it caused mega-tsunamis thousands of meters high. (Try to imagine this scene.) If an asteroid this size struck the Earth today, it could possibly wipe out the entire human species!
Meteor Crater in Arizona
If you want to see what happens when an asteroid hits the Earth, then take a look at Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona. (An asteroid becomes a meteor as it burns white hot in the atmosphere.) About 50,000 years ago, an asteroid struck the earth, leaving this crater, which is about 4,000 feet in diameter and 150 feet deep. Made of nickel and iron, the asteroid that blasted out this hole in the ground was about 50 meters (54 yards) across. The energy of the impact has been estimated at 10 megatons. You wouldn't have wanted to be within a 100 miles of this hot spot!
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
In July 1994, people discovered what happens when an asteroid slams into a planet. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was actually a comet, which is simply an asteroid with ice on it. As the comet orbited the planet Jupiter, it broke into smaller parts, all of which eventually fell into the planet, releasing incredible amounts of kinetic energy. The largest chunk, fragment G (about a mile across), struck Jupiter with the equivalent force of 6 million megatons of TNT, 600 times the world's nuclear arsenal, the impact creating a dark cloud the size of the Earth!

As an aside, it's a good thing Jupiter is out there "vacuuming up" comets and asteroids before they have a chance to the hit the earth; otherwise, life may not have gotten a foothold on this planet because of the nearly constant bombardment over millions of years!
Tunguska Event
Nobody knows for sure what it was, but an object from space exploded over the Tunguska region in Siberia in June 1908. Most experts believe it was a rocky asteroid or comet, about 90 yards across, which detonated some 5 miles above the surface of the Earth, the explosion flattening over 800 square miles of pine forest. If the Tunguska Event had happened over one of Earth's mega cities, it would be similar to a 30-megaton nuclear bomb exploding in the air, likely incinerating millions of people within seconds!
Apophis
Co-founder of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, Eugene Shoemaker estimated that a Tunguska-like event occurs on earth about every 300 years.

Out in space is an asteroid that may have Earth in its crosshairs. Apophis, an 800-foot chunk of rock (much larger than the Tunguska impactor), will approach the earth in 2029; and if it passes through what's called a gravitational keyhole, then it could strike the Earth in 2036. However, the odds are very small that it will ever collide with our planet - about one in 250,000. At any rate, such an asteroid probably wouldn't end civilization, but it could destroy any city on Earth!

Some Russian scientists caution that even if Apophis misses the Earth, it could break into many smaller parts, any of which could strike the planet.

According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson' book Death by Black Hole, if Apophis hits the Earth, it will plunge into the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii. "The tsunami it creates," the book reads, "will wipe out the entire west coast of North America, bury Hawaii, and devastate all the land masses of the Pacific Rim."
Other NEA's
But in 2013, NASA refined its measurements and predicts that Apophis definitely will not strike the Earth in 2036, although it could do so in April 2068, but the odds are about one in 256,000.

Asteroid 2011 CQ1, which missed the Earth by only 3,400 miles in early 2011, could strike the Earth when it returns in 2022. This is not a big asteroid, but Asteroid 2005 YU55, a 1,300-foot monster, passed within 200,000 miles of the Earth on November 8, 2011. If it had hit the Earth, it would have blasted a crater more than four times the size of Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona. Whew! That was a close one!

In Recent Times

On February 15, 2013, asteroid 2012 DA14, swung within 17,200 miles of Earth, close enough to collide with a communications satellite. This asteroid is no pebble in the sky. Measured at about 160 feet across, it's the approximate size of the asteroid that exploded over the Tunguska region of Russia in 1908; it's also about the same size as the asteroid that created Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona.

Astonishingly, on the same day, a large meteor streaked across the sky in central Russia!

As reported on "Meteor Strike," an episode of the TV program Nova, first shown on March 27, 2013, the meteor approached the Earth at a shallow angle and exploded high in the atmosphere, injuring about 300 people. If this meteor - actually an asteroid about 65 feet across - would have plunged to Earth at a steeper angle, it could have exploded much closer to the surface or hit the ground, perhaps killing hundreds if not thousands of people. The people of Russia are fortunate indeed!

On April 14, 2017, an asteroid labeled JO25, nicknamed "The Rock" and about the size of the Rock of Gibraltar, missed Earth by about 1.1 million miles. This meteoroid is about 2,000 feet long and if it had hit the Earth it may have ended civilization for the next hundred years or so. But, scientists said, the odds of this object actually hitting the Earth were only one in a million. Hey, if people had these odds of winning, they'd buy more lottery tickets!

A so-called lost asteroid, because it was discovered in 2010 and subsequently lost by scientists, whizzed past the Earth on May 15, 2018. Labeled 2010 WC9, this meteoroid missed our planet by just 126,000 miles. At 130 meters long, or about the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza, this space rock could wipe out any city on Earth and is about six times larger than the meteor that exploded over Russia five years. Let's hope scientists or any other observers never again lose sight of this city-buster!

What Can We Do?

Just about any scientist will tell you that it's only a matter of time before the Earth is struck by an asteroid large enough to cause massive damage and loss of life. What can we do about such an eventuality? Not much. But keep in the mind that there are many agencies that watch for asteroids. Chances are any asteroid miles across will be spotted months if not years before it can strike the Earth, which would give agencies such as NASA and the U.S. military plenty of time to change the trajectory of the asteroid or destroy it.

Regarding such matters, in March 2015, the United Nations created two new organizations: the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group (SMPAG) and the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), both of which dedicated to protecting the Earth from an asteroid strike or at least mitigate the damage if one strikes the planet.

But when NEA's hundreds of feet across come around, there may be little warning. Just hope you're not in the path of this lethal thing from space. Yet it will hit somewhere, and the most likely worldwide result will be a reduction in food production due to the massive amount of debris blown into the atmosphere. This sunlight blocking scenario would make food prices skyrocket. So, if possible, be prepared for that, however you can.

Please leave a comment.

Meteor explosion in Russia

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Kosmo has great interest in astronomical matters and belongs to the Sacramento Valley Astronomical Society. Do you like living dangerously? Well, you don't have much choice. In the game of cosmic billiards, the cue ball is headed our way - sooner or later!

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Google.com
Wikipedia.com
Nasa.gov
Youtube.com
DiscoveryChannel.com
History.com
Owlcation.com

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A small rocky body orbiting the sun. Large numbers of these, ranging in size from nearly 600 miles (1,000 km) across (Ceres) to dust particles, are found (as the asteroid belt ) especially between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, though some have more eccentric orbits, and a few pass close to the earth or enter the atmosphere as meteors.

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65 Million years ago, an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest(About 6 miles in height) slammed into the Earth going 40,000 miles per hour. In 1991, a crater was discovered near the Gulf of Mexico that is 110 miles in diameter(Chicxulub Crater). The meteor that hit here is believed to be the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

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It's not a question of if, but when...

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Discovery Channel - Large Asteroid Impact Simulation

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- Satellites could be placed  in Earth orbit that would allow us to track NEOs.
-Would be pointed away from the sun to see any incoming asteroids(light's glare can block certain asteroids, making them invisible).
-Would compute the light curve(rotational period) to calculate the mass, size, and trajectory.
- The satellites would send computed data back to Earth to see whether or not it is on a collision course, and if so, to put nessecary measures in place to make sure it doesn't impact.
-Infrared cameras would also be in place to detect any "hidden" asteroids(Some asteroids can give off thermal radiation).

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If an impact were to happen, how would we stop it??
- Laser Sublimation, or Mirror Satellites would help save the human race.
-These satellites would be sent into space after the detection satellites have detected the trajectory of the asteroid(If on a collision course with Earth).
-Would focus the suns rays on a certain spot of the asteroid.
-The heat would melt the surrounding area of rock, creating an ejector
-This ejector would create thrust, and this thrust would move the asteroid out of the way.
- This idea could not only could change the couse of the asteroid, but also blow it to smitherienes.