Relief May Be On The Way

Keep Watching The Skies

Please please please please!

The deal is, following the in-atmosphere meteorite explosion on the other side of the world last whenever cosmic eggheads now figure even objets d'espace less than a klick across can cause big trouble.

A 450-foot-wide asteroid, Dr. Lu said, would be equivalent to 150 million tons of TNT. “You’re not going to wipe out humanity,” he said, “but if you get unlucky, you could kill 50 million people or you could collapse the world economy for a century, two centuries.”

Dr. Lu said astronomers had found only 10 to 20 percent of the near-Earth asteroids of that size.

Sentinel would also spot many smaller ones that could still be devastating. “What we’ve been talking about are the ones that would only destroy a major metropolitan area — all of New York City and the surrounding area,” Dr. Lu said.