Is a meterorite heading to earth?

Question

I was watching a show on dinosaurs and they were showing a graphical representation of a meteor hitting earth. So I was thinking, if a large meteor was heading towards earth today how much time/notice would we have? How do you think our governments would deal with it? Would it unit countries at war or would they just leave it to the US to deal with?

Answer 1

There are small ones hitting our atmosphere all the time. Google on the search for earth crossing asteroids. Right now, the chances are better that we would not know until it hit. It might be travelling at 50000 miles per hour and the first clue we would have would be a bright light in the sky, a few seconds or minutes before the shock wave hit (which we would not hear coming because it would be travelling much faster than the speed of sound). The good new is that big meteor hits are fairly rare in the scale of human life times. The bad news is that there could be one about to hit us tomorrow and we don't know it is coming.

Merry Christmas

Answer 2

Meteors constantly hit the Earth every hour. Most of them are small enough that they burn up in the atmosphere before reaching the ground.
As far as any objects hitting Earth, NASA has a Near-Earth Object program.
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/
This program detects, tracks, and characterizes any objects that could hit the earth, or come within a certain distance of it. Of the thousands they have classified, about 900 are Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA). These have the possibility of being a threat, however small.
As far as notice goes, I would imagine if its anything significantly large, it would be easy to track in space so we would have at least years of notice (on order of tens or hundreds of years). If this does happen, it would be in the best interest of several countries combining efforts to eliminate the threat. Even if the governments were unwilling to collaborate, perhaps the private industries would be willing to band together on the problem.

Answer 3

Well yea all the time,but we don't see it cause the earth atmoshpere burns it away.


But there has been some metors that have landed on earth(like the donosaur time)

but heres some pictures of metores that have landed on earth

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kiefer/Education/SSRG2-Craters/meteor_crater.gif

http://meteorites.asu.edu/images/education/barringer-big.jpg


It's in Winslow, Arizona.

(The crater is believed to have formed from the impact of a large (30-50 m diameter) iron meteorite 50,000 years ago. The crater is about 1.2 km in diameter.)

Answer 4

Our government? If Clinton couldn't sleep with it, and a Kennedy couldn't drown it, I suppose the Bush admin. couldn't think about it..it would take the Canadians to send a hockey team to destroy it, the Chinese to make toys out of it, or someone else to make a religion out of it. Ain't no way any government is going to admit it, we are just dinosaurs.

Answer 5

Here's the truth for everyone:
NASA is under congressional order not to inform the public of a doomsday object. at least not right away.
Happy New Year then.

Answer 6

yes meterorite are large mass of rock falling from space and when they fall into earth they form large craters

Answer 7

yes they would have to know,if they know that there's going to be a asteroid hitting mars in January then they have to know whats coming to earth.this is a link the the one that's going to hit mars
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/12/21/mars.asteroid.ap/index.html

Answer 8

Oh, the US. The GREAT GOD of our Earth!