Emergency Asteroid-Impact Number Activated...

Scientists successfully spotted and tracked an Earth-impacting asteroid last year, projecting its point of "hitting the planet we live on" a day in advance and scrambling scientific response teams. It's estimated that a major impact occurs every million years (see impact map above). Luckily, last-year's not-quite-death-rock was pretty small and crashed into a desert, which is mostly already dead, so the science response was just "go and look at it." Had it been bigger, our options remain "Have a good time" and "Make jokes about Bruce Willis."

The four-meter space stone 2008 TC3 was first spotted by an automated Arizona telescope, which alerted human authorities - so either the machines aren't ready to take us out yet, or they're waiting for something to do the job right. As soon as somebody ran the numbers and confirmed that holy hell, this thing was actually going to hit us, it triggered a massive surge in scientific sky-watching world wide - including calls to a US "Emergency Asteroid Impact Number", which we didn't even know existed, and e-mails with the actual subject "IMPACT TONIGHT!!!" - so if we do all die in a rocky fireball it's because an urgent warning was deleted as spam.

The asteroid slammed into the sky above the Sudanese Nubian desert at 12 kilometers a second and promptly blew the hell up. The explosion, equivalent to one and a half million kilograms of TNT, was visible from over a thousand kilometers away - and thanks to the early alert, was watched by everyone from commercial pilots to European weather satellites.

The impact has been hailed as a success for asteroid-watching technology, but that's only half the story - it's true that we can predict their motion when we do spot them, but whether we do with any amount of time left to do so is still up to chance. The fact is, this rock was on a guaranteed collision course with Earth and wasn't spotted until the night before impact. Sleep well!

Posted by Luke McKinney.