Related: Asteroid On Collision Course With Earth
"Ex-astronaut makes case for better asteroid detection" by Henry Fountain | New York Times, March 21, 2013
Making a case for the need to detect asteroids before they hit Earth, a former astronaut said Wednesday that the number of casualties would have been enormous had the space rock that exploded in Russia last month blown apart directly over New York City instead.
See: Sunday Globe Wake-Up Call
“We’d have a lot more than broken windows, that’s for sure,’’ the former astronaut, Edward Lu, told a Senate panel in Washington.
Lu, also a former Google executive, is now the chief executive of the B612 Foundation, a Silicon Valley group that wants to build a privately financed asteroid-detecting space telescope.
About 1,500 people were injured when the meteor, roughly 60 feet in diameter, exploded high in the atmosphere near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15.
Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass from shattered windows when a shock wave from the explosion — estimated to have been about 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima — hit the city about a minute and a half later.
“Had that shock wave been a lot closer to a city, it would have caused a lot more damage,’’ Lu said.
He also noted that if the Tunguska event — the explosion of an asteroid roughly 150 feet long over Siberia in 1908 — had occurred over New York, ‘‘whatever the population of New York City is, they’d be gone.’’
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Also see: Slow Saturday Special: Meteor Shit!
Related:
"China’s latest spacecraft with humans aboard successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab and educate young people about science. On the heels of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s popular YouTube videos from the International Space Station, the Chinese crew plans to deliver talks to students from aboard the Tiangong 1, which functions as an experimental prototype for a much larger Chinese space station to be launched in 2020....
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