If you've seen films like "Armageddon,"
you know the potential threat asteroids can be for Earth. To meet that threat,
NASA has built a map like no other: a plot of every dangerous asteroid that
could potentially endanger our planet … at least the ones we know about.
NASA released the new map of "potentially hazardous asteroids" in a
post to its online Planetary Photojournal overseen by the agency's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The map shows the orbital paths of
more than 1,400 asteroids known creep too close to Earth for comfort. None of
the asteroids mapped pose an impact threat to Earth within the next 100 years,
agency officials said.
"These are the asteroids considered hazardous because they are
fairly large (at least 460 feet or 140 meters in size), and because they follow
orbits that pass close to the Earth's orbit (within 4.7 million miles or 7.5
million kilometers)," NASA officials explained in the image description.
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