Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator has revealed that the possibilities of a dreaded asteroid hit are not something that is reserved for Hollywood disaster movies. Bridenstine made these remarks while talking at the Planetary Defense Conference at Washington.
Interestingly, the statement from Bridenstine came at a time when NASA and ESA are busy preparing to test a planetary defense weapon aimed at protecting earth during times of lethal asteroid hits.
"We have to make sure that people understand that this is not about Hollywood, it's not about the movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know, right now, to host life and that is the planet Earth," said Bridenstine during the conference, Daily Mail reports.
The NASA administrator also pointed out the example of Chelyabinsk asteroid hit event to explain the dreaded aftermath of earth's collision with a rogue space body. It should be noted that the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was the largest ever since the Tunguska event that happened in 1908. The Chelyabinsk explosion caused injury to more than 1600 people, and experts believe that the meteor blast created the energy of more than 20 Hiroshima bomb blasts.
Bridenstine revealed that such incidents had happened at least three times in the past 100 years, and he also made it clear that the possibilities of life-threatening asteroid hits could not be ruled out in the future.
During the conference, Bridenstine also made it clear that NASA had already tracked 90 percent of the near-earth objects that are more than 459 feet in diameter. He added that developing a planetary defense weapon is as important as landing astronauts on the moon.
This is not the first time that an expert is talking about the possibilities of a catastrophic asteroid hit. A few months back, Dr Iain McDonald, a top scientist at the Cardiff University's school of earth and ocean sciences had revealed that earth will inevitably get hit by a doomsday asteroid one day or the other. As per McDonald, devastating asteroid hits have happened in the past, and it will continue threatening the earth in the future too.
