NASA Scientist Warns Earth Is 'Totally Unprepared' for an Asteroid Hit

A scientist with NASA warns that, should the earth suddenly be struck by an asteroid, we’d basically all be completely and totally screwed.

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysicists  Union, a NASA researcher with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Dr Joseph Nuth, claimed that we’re all but doomed should an asteroid strike us now. 

“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” Nuth said at the meeting. He also said that while it’s not exceptionally likely a catastrophic asteroid will come barreling at us any moment, it’s something he thinks we should prep for.

“But on the other hand they are the extinction-level events, things like dinosaur killers, they’re 50 to 60 million years apart, essentially. You could say, of course, we’re due, but it’s a random course at that point,” Nuth told his fellow geophysicists, according to the Guardian. 

The possible solutions to prevent a catastrophic asteroid from wiping us all out sound straight out of sci-fi. Nuth discussed a close shave when a comet flew into Jupiter 20 years ago and again when another came perilously close to Mars in 2014. In the case of the second comet, it was only discovered 22 months before its near-miss.

“If you look at the schedule for high-reliability spacecraft and launching them, it takes five years to launch a spacecraft,” he said. “We had 22 months of total warning.”

To be able to better defend against the extraterrestrial threat, Nuth has recommended NASA build an interceptor rocket which could cut the launch time in half. Yet even that, he warned, would still leave the Earth extremely vulnerable. 

Sources:

Let us not forget that in 2013, NASA chief Charles Bolden said Earth defenseless in asteroid strike.
https://www.rt.com/news/asteroid-eart…

Could An Asteroid Destroy The Earth? ‘Not A Lot We Can Do About It,’ Warns NASA Scientist
http://www.ibtimes.com/could-asteroid…

ESO, ESA/HUBBLE & NASA
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