How dangerous are near-Earth asteroids? 5 key questions answered.

On Feb. 15, asteroid 2012 DA14, discovered a year ago, cleared Earth by a scant 17,200 miles. The same day, a smaller, unrelated asteroid that no one saw coming exploded 12 to 15 miles above Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. Events that day highlight the risk that near-Earth objects (NEOs) can pose – although to some extent, humans can counter them.

3. What's being done to improve detection?

The vast majority of detections have come from US efforts. Three US ground-based telescope projects are now operating: LINEAR (Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research), the Catalina Sky Survey, and Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System). The newest is Pan-STARRS, led by the University of Hawaii. The school is also setting up a network of smaller telescopes, dubbed ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System), for quick scans of the sky each night.

A future possibility: infrared space telescopes dedicated to searching for NEOs. Infrared wavelengths are better suited for spotting NEOs that are too dim for visual telescopes to pick up. If funded, these telescopes could be launched toward the end of this decade.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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