It’s called ATLAS, which stands for the ominous-sounding Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System, and its creators say they’ll be able to provide a one-week warning of incoming ”city killers”–rocks about 150 wide–and three weeks notice of “county killers”–ones three times as large.

Scientists at the University of Hawaii, with NASA funding, are developing a network of telescopes designed to find the smaller ones.

And the one that did blow apart over Russia and hurt so many people was only 55 feet wide. NASA figures it’s located only 1 percent of the near-Earth objects that small. They may not sound very menacing, but keep in mind that the rock that missed us Friday was roughly 150 feet wide and it would have had a cataclysmic impact if it had exploded over or landed on a populated area. These are known as “planet-killers,” space rocks so large that if they collided with Earth, it would pretty much end civilization as we know it. None, I’m happy to say, are headed our way.īut move down a bit in size to asteroids roughly between 100 feet and a half mile wide and it’s a very different story. The good news is that NASA, which really didn’t start tracking near-Earth objects until the mid-1990s, believes it has charted almost 95 percent of the 980 asteroids more than a half-mile wide that are orbiting in our part of the universe. Also, that if the flyby asteroid, which was three times that size, had been on target to hit our planet, we really couldn’t have done much about it–the giant rock was spotted by a team of amateur astronomers in Spain only a year ago.Īll of which prompted two basic questions: “How much warning will we get before a monster asteroid collides with the planet?” and “What’s the plan for stopping it?” But there was something sobering about seeing how much damage could be done by rock about as big as one and and a half school buses.

Most of us have moved on, taking comfort in the belief that that’s not happening again any time soon. But when you throw in the considerably smaller meteorite that exploded over Russia the same day and injured more than 1,000 people–that’s never happened before–you’re talking about one extremely unique moment in space rock history. That’s how often, according to NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of the one that flew by Friday gets that close to hitting the Earth–it passed 17,000 miles away. Actually, a lot less frequently than that. Last Friday was, astronomically speaking, one of those days that comes along every 40 years. Last week’s asteroid pass was the closest ever predicted.

Prepare for ramming speed