How Much Damage Would Meteor Strike Do?

There have been many theories about the odds of the Earth being hit by an asteroid that could do major damage and the news has been filled with many ideas on how to prevent a dangerous crash. Now there are different opinions on whether or not a meteorite actually caused a crater in Peru recently.

The European Space Agency has been doing research on just this type of situation and they have just released the results that show how we can deal with the occupancies.

Their studies show that in all probability we should be more worried about the smaller prices of rock, those that are just about a few hundred meters across instead of the larger ones.

Astronomers around the world are working together to catalog most of the larger space objects. They are using a large number of survey telescopes that are going to be able to detect up to 90% of all the space objects that are near the Earth down to those as small as 1.40 meters by approximately 2020. When this project is done, they will be able to assess the situation and determine if we will need to establish observatories in space for the purpose of finding the rest.

One reason why they feel that the smaller objects can be more of a problem is because it is so difficult to predict their orbits. From ground observations, it is almost impossible to determine what their path will be with enough precision to be able to rule out any impact with the earth.
Based on these findings, the European Space Agency is focusing its efforts on a concept to, in their words, mark a cross on the small asteroids and there by check the accuracy of their technology. They call their project Don Quijote and it proposes a two-phase study. In the first part, a spacecraft would meet up with an asteroid and to into an orbit around it. Its purpose would be to monitor the asteroid for a few months, with the aim of precisely determining its position as well as the shape mass and gravity field.