Sentences with phrase «of the large asteroids near»

«NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,» said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver.

«NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and, while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,» NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver said of the Grand Challenge.

Not exact matches

NASA is currently developing concepts for the redirect mission that will employ a robotic spacecraft, driven by an advanced solar electric propulsion system, to capture a small near - Earth asteroid or remove a boulder from the surface of a larger asteroid.

NASA is now quite sure that no Earth - killer asteroids are on a near - term collision course, but 50 - meter asteroids (large enough to flatten a city) strike every few hundred years, and almost all of them are uncharted.

Over Sentinel's 6 1/2 year mission, it will complete NASA's mandate to find 90 percent of the near - Earth asteroids larger than 140 meters wide.

In 2005, Congress directed NASA to find 90 per cent of near - Earth asteroids 140 metres across and larger by 2020 — but a 2010 panel found that existing surveys weren't up to the job.

As of March 24, 2016, the program had counted 14,020 near - Earth asteroids, with diameters ranging from less than 30 meters (98 feet) to larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 mile).

According to scientists, there are about a million near - Earth asteroids large enough to level a city the size of New York.

The world's two largest radio telescopes have combined to make detailed radar images of the cloud - shrouded surface of Venus and of a tiny asteroid that passed near the Earth.

A fairly large near - Earth asteroid found 3 years ago will travel safely past Earth on April 19 at a range of approximately 1.1 million miles, or around 4.6 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

«About 16 % of near - Earth asteroids larger than 200 meters in diameter [those detected by Earth - based radar] may be binary systems.»

In a ranking of near - term «fatal discontinuities» in his 2008 book, «Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years,» Vaclav Smil puts asteroid collisions far below the persistent risk of large - scale war (particularly because so many nuclear weapons are still arrayed around the world), great earthquakes and tsunamis and pandemics, but above global warming (because of its gradual slope).

1) Nudge a 1 - mi diameter nickel - iron asteroid into near - Earth orbit, and it will (rather readily) yield as much precious metal as has been mined from the Earth's crust in all history, plus huge amounts of base metals (useful mostly for large - scale orbital construction, etc.) 2) Plasma torches from either self - generated Syngas or from prospective fusion plants will enable nearly complete recycling of all waste, including landfills and equipment graveyards, etc., by reducing it to pure elemental form.

Right now there is little uncertainty (no large asteroids have a significant chance of hitting the earth in the near future, and geological records show tens of millions of years between major strikes).

The researchers calculate that the largest near - Earth asteroid, 1036 Ganymed, could maintain a dust cloud large enough to block out 6.58 percent of the solar radiation that would normally reach Earth, more than enough to combat any current global warming trends.