I was having this conversation with some family the other day, in fact: how is human civilization gonna get it? My answer was “probably war-plus-technology.” I mean, our methods of killing each other sure as hell aren’t getting worse. This was put up against “asteroids,” or an asteroid anyhow. Which makes sense: an asteroid apocalypse is the one we know pretty well because. . .it actually happened. But, a new survey of near-Earth objects released today puts the odds of us going out like the dinosaurs quite a bit lower.First off, we’ve found 90-percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids — asteroids that orbit within 120 million miles of the sun and into Earth’s own orbital neighborhood — a goal put forth by the U.S. Congress in 1998. Turns out that instead of the 35,000 near-Earth mid-size asteroids previously thought to exist, there’s only about 19,500. Phew, I guess, though that doesn’t really tell us if that’s necessarily less hazardous asteroids, the ones that get really close. Though, I suppose you can infer (as I did pretty boldly in this post’s title).Anyhow, the new results come courtesy of NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting arm of NASA’s WISE sky-imaging mission. The WISE space telescope went into hibernation last winter, but we’ll be crunching results from it until at least next spring.“NEOWISE allowed us to take a look at a more representative slice of the near-Earth asteroid numbers and make better estimates about the whole population,” said Amy Mainzer, lead author of the new study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, and principal investigator for the NEOWISE project, in a press blast. “It’s like a population census, where you poll a small group of people to draw conclusions about the entire country.” Specifically, NEOWISE cataloged 100 thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and another 585 closer to Earth.
As for the large asteroids, figure about the size of a small mountain, which NEOWISE was cataloging as part of that congressional initiative, Spaceguard, NASA was able to revise downward the total number from about 1,000 to 981. We’ve got a bead on 911 of those already, and can say pretty confidentially that none of this particular civilization-ending sort of asteroid will be a problem in the next few centuries.There’s still a lot of mid-size guys, which could take out a whole metropolitan area if not a whole civilization, out there unaccounted for, just a lot less. Currently, NASA is tracking 5,200 of them. Meanwhile, there are millions of even smaller asteroids hanging around Earth, which could still fuck some things up pretty good.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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