It came in in the daytime sky out of the Sun. Weve got telescopes looking out there for these objects, but they only work at night. Radar doesnt help either because to really use radar to find these objects above the atmosphere, you have to know exac...
Approaching from beneath the planet, asteroid 2012 DA14 passed inside the orbit of our geostationary satellites before heading off to the north. This asteroid had been successfully tracked for a year. And despite its proximity, scientists knew that i...
An asteroid strike would create a huge explosion. NASA feared this might even be mistaken for a nuclear bomb. We wanted folks to know this was a natural event by Mother Nature rather than some sort of man-made event like a missile or something dreadf...
On 6th October 2008, asteroid hunter Richard Kowalski saw something that would change the assessment of threats presented by asteroid impacts. The night was proceeding normally and up on the screen came another asteroid. As I continued to make observ...
Tim has developed a map to visualize their location. And on that map, the most important are the Near-Earth asteroids, the ones closest to the planet. On the screen here is a map of the solar system. And Ive got the Sun in the centre and the third pl...
Luckily, the very biggest asteroids are few and far between. But there are still plenty of rocks out there that represent a significant danger to us. So, at the summit of an extinct Hawaiian volcano, Professor Nick Kaiser and his colleagues are searc...
The meteorite was 15 kilometres across, enough to cause utter devastation across the whole planet. It exploded with a force of 100 million million tones of TNT. The blast sent a giant plume of vaporized rock out into space. A crater was punched 30 ki...
As the divers have explored further, they discovered the Siluteis are actually part of a huge complex of tounels and caves.In fact, when you look from above, you can see Senluties scattered across hundreds of kilometers.And when they were mapped, it...
Look at the size of this! This is magnificent! That is beautiful. This cave may be stunning, but it provides the evidence for one of the greatest catastrophes in the Earths history. And that water, its so clear! Lower the gear, please! Theres actuall...
Comparing the effects of an airburst with a ground strike, it seems the Chelyabinsk got away lightly. Its estimated that the largest piece to hit the ground weighed 500 kilos, a fraction of the asteroids original mass of 7,000 tonnes. Now if a piece...