Space Telescope

There have been a host of big screen and television disaster movies featuring comets, meteors and asteroids either colliding with or on a collision course to earth. Big screen productions such as Meteor (1979), Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998) and the very recent Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012) feature huge extraterrestrial objects hurtling toward earth.

Discovery News quotes Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, head of NASA’s Near Earth Object (NEO) Program Office, "On a daily basis, we're hit with basketball-sized objects, and Volkswagen-sized objects come in a few times a year."

Large scale impacts are not without precedent. National Geographic says scientists theorize that on June 30, 1908 a meteor may have crashed into a remote area of Siberia with a force of roughly 15 megatons.

I’ve read some stories that believe the asteroid named 2011AG5, which is 460 feet wide, could impact the earth in 2040. However, Yahoo News reports that NASA estimates the odds of 2011AG5 crashing into earth as a 1 (one) on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. (The likelihood of a collision is so low as to be effectively zero.)

But, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen; stranger things have occurred. After all, the Red Sox did win two World Series.

Courtesy Google Images

Enter, the Sentinel Mission. According to their website, the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit group of independent scientists, is planning to raise funds to build, launch, and operate the first privately funded deep space mission – a space telescope to be placed in orbit around the sun. The intent is to create a comprehensive map of our inner solar system illustrating the paths of 98% of the asteroids, both large and small. They hope to have the telescope in orbit within 10 years.

But I wonder, if a huge meteor is discovered bearing down on our hapless planet, would we be able to do anything more than brace for impact?

What do you think? Would you want to know if the world was going to end in 21 days?