10 INCOMING ASTEROIDS

Discover the near-future encounters Earth will have with passing asteroids - some more hazardous than others

- ANDREW MAY

As scary as an incoming asteroid may sound, it doesn’t have to mean the end of the world. It’s true space rocks sometimes collide with our planet, as happened with devastating effect 66 million years ago when a massive impact wiped out the dinosaurs. But such events are the exception rather than the rule. By astronomical standards, Earth is a very small target. Asteroids move on precisely determined orbits, so the vast majority of them simply whiz past the planet at a safe distance. Such encounters are a good thing for astronomers because they give them a chance to study asteroids at close range, and these small, rocky objects can tell us a lot about the origin and evolution of the Solar System. When the first asteroids were discovered, they were all found to lie in an ‘asteroid belt’ between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It’s still true today that most known asteroids are located in this region.