Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Wham!

Between 2000 and 2013, 26 asteroids packing at least the energy of 1 kilotonne of TNT hit Earth or exploded in its atmosphere. That's up to 10 times as many as you would expect from existing models of the frequency of asteroid strikes.

These strikes were partially detected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Detection Network, which monitors for the covert testing of nuclear weapons. Now the B612 Foundation, which is building the first privately funded asteroid-hunting space telescope, has turned the underlying data into a visualization.

B612 released this animation/visualization of those impacts.  It's not clear whether this 13 years of data shows more asteroid impact activity than usual or if it's par for the course.

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