NASA and ESA ensure that tens of thousands of asteroids are ready to rain on Earth

WASHINGTON – NASA just saved Earth from a dangerous asteroid threat by crashing the DART spacecraft, but that asteroid isn’t the only one – there are at least more than 30,000 asteroids very close to Earth.

According to the European Space Agency (ESA). As many as 1,425 of them are said to have the potential to hit Earth.

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“The good news is that more than half of the currently known near-Earth asteroids have been discovered in the past six years, demonstrating how much our vision of asteroids has improved,” said Richard Moissl, ESA’s head of planetary defense.

According to the Daily Mail, on Tuesday (10/18/2022), thousands of these asteroids were detected thanks to ESA’s latest advanced telescope: from 30,039 NEAs it is estimated that they are about 10,000 with a diameter greater than 460 feet ( 140 meters).

ESA also claims that there are 1,000 asteroids over 3,280 feet (one kilometer) in diameter. Most of them are found in the asteroid belt, the ring-shaped region of the Solar System, which lies roughly between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.

Today, asteroids make up about one third of the roughly one million asteroids discovered in the Solar System so far. The first near-Earth asteroid discovered was called Eros 433.

This asteroid was first noticed by the German astronomer Carl Gustav Witt at the Berlin Observatory on August 13, 1898, with a strange shape, an elongated and rocky composition.

The orbit of 433 Eros brings it to a distance of about 13.5 million miles from Earth or 57 times the distance of the Moon. In addition to being the first to be discovered, 433 Eros became the first asteroid to be orbited and visited by a spaceship.

The NEAR Shoemaker studied Eros from close orbit for a year before landing on its surface in February 2001.