NASA, the United States space agency is now busy developing a planetary defense weapon, aimed to combat space threats like asteroids and meteorites. However, a section of people has now started believing that the space agency is obsolete, and is incapable of protecting the earth from rogue space bodies. This argument from skeptics has now got heated up after an asteroid named 2019 MO burned up in the skies of the Caribbean on July 22, 2019.
The asteroid was apparently traveling at a speed of 14.9 kilometers per hour, and it had a size of just three meters. As NASA failed to detect the asteroid, Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies revealed that the space agency is not tracking smaller asteroids like 2019 MO as they are very small, and it will not pose any kind of threats to the planet.
"Asteroids this size are far smaller than what we're tasked to track. They're so small, they would not survive passing through our atmosphere to cause damage to Earth's surface. But this event shows how capable our search programs are, even for objects of such small sizes," said David Farnocchia.
NASA also added that the data available about this asteroid were not yet conclusive as the body had been spotted only four times in just under half an hour. The space agency also admitted that they had no idea about the trajectory of this asteroid.
A few days back, Lembit Opik, the Chairman of Parliament for the space nation Asgardia had revealed that earth will surely face a doomsday scenario one day or the other due to an asteroid hit. Opik also added that the chances of earth being hit by a doomsday asteroid is 100 percent.
Popular physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson also has similar views, and he had also claimed that life on the earth will be wiped out due to an asteroid collision.
