25,000 hidden asteroids lurking near Earth pose major threat: NASA scientist says the fear 'keeps me up at night'

Humans are incapable of protecting themselves from an asteroid strike, a NASA scientist has warned. Even though the space agency is regularly monitoring space rocks that could pose danger to Earth, there are nearly 25,000 of them hovering around us that remain undetected. These asteroids have the potential to flatten cities in a particular region. So even though a global catastrophe might not occur, these rocks can definitely cause massive regional destruction. Kelly Fast, head of planetary defence at NASA, has triggered panic after she admitted that nobody is ready to protect us from city-killers. "What keeps me up at night is the asteroids we don’t know about," Fast said while speaking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Sun reported. She says we know about the small rocks and about those that are huge. But the asteroids that are about 140 metres and large remain hidden from sight, but are lurking near Earth.

Fast said these asteroids can "really do regional rather than global damage, and we don’t know where they are." She added, "It’s estimated there are about 25,000 of those and we’re only about 40 per cent of the way through." Adding to the worry is another scientist, Dr Nancy Chabot, from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. She headed NASA's DART mission in 2022, and yet, isn't optimistic about saving Earth from a potential city-killer asteroid. She said, "We don’t know where 50 per cent of the 140-metre asteroids are, which is a concern. We would not have any way to go and actively deflect one right now." Chatbot says there is no investment being made into protecting Earth from these asteroids, as there is a lack of cash.

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Why can't a mission like DART save Earth from an asteroid today?

Chabot says this is because we don't have anything like it ready to go. "We don’t have [another] DART just lying around. If something like YR4 had been headed towards the Earth, we would not have any way to go and deflect it actively right now," she said. Asteroid 2024 YR4 is a city-killer space rock that was given a small chance of smashing into Earth in 2032. However, later calculations showed that this will not happen. This asteroid has a high probability of crashing into the Moon, according to NASA.

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DART mission

The DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos, a moonlet of the asteroid Didymos in 2022. It was meant to test a method of planetary defence against near-Earth objects (NEOs). It launched on 24 November 2021 and hit Dimorphos on 26 September 2022, almost a year later. Using a similar defence mechanism against another asteroid would more or less require a similar window. This means if an asteroid were to make a sudden appearance, Nancy and Kelly's fear might come true.