{"id":8463,"date":"2017-06-30T15:08:43","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T22:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=8463"},"modified":"2017-07-01T15:12:07","modified_gmt":"2017-07-01T22:12:07","slug":"humanitys-greatest-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2017\/06\/30\/humanitys-greatest-challenge\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanity’s Greatest Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

from Phys.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Are asteroids humanity’s ‘greatest challenge’?<\/h1>\n
by Mari\u00ebtte Le Roux<\/h5>\n

\"Close<\/a>Close encounter: NASA graphic showing asteroid 1998 QE2, which caused a brief scare when it skimmed past Earth in 2013. But one day a space rock is bound to be on target, say worried scientists<\/em><\/p>\n

Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled by space rocks that have caused anything from an innocuous splash in the ocean to species annihilation.<\/p>\n

When the next big impact will be, nobody knows.<\/p>\n

But the pressure is on to predict\u2014and intercept\u2014its arrival.<\/p>\n

“Sooner or later we will get… a minor or major impact,” Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told AFP ahead of International Asteroid Day on Friday.<\/p>\n

It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but “the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high.”<\/p>\n

For now, there is little we can do.<\/p>\n

And yet, the first-ever mission to crash a probe into a small space<\/a> rock to alter its trajectory suffered a major setback when European ministers declined in December to fund part of the project.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at Phys.org<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from Phys.org Are asteroids humanity’s ‘greatest challenge’? by Mari\u00ebtte Le Roux Close encounter: NASA graphic showing asteroid 1998 QE2, which caused a brief scare when it skimmed past Earth in 2013. But one day a space rock is bound to be on target, say worried scientists Throughout its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been repeatedly pummelled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}