Killer asteroid may be blasting towards Earth right now but we have no way to detect it – Daily Star
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Another city-killer asteroid could be hurtling towards Earth completely undetected, a space agency chief had warned.
Luca Conversi believes there is a chance "something the size of YR4 " – the football-pitch sized space rock spotted hurtling towards us last year – is approaching from the Sun.
But it could be that we just haven’t detected it, like the last major asteroid to hit Earth, an asteroid which smashed through the icy plains of southern Russia in 2013.
Luckily, it didn’t hit anything but it did trigger a sonic boom which shattered all the windows in the nearby town if Chelyabinsk, leaving hundreds of onlookers injured by shattered glass.
Luca, a scientist at the European Space Agency, says it went "completely undetected, because it came from the direction of the Sun".
And we still don't have the tech to let us search the space between Earth and the Sun, because it is simply too bright.
The ESA says on its website: "Hidden in the glare of our Sun are an unknown number of asteroids on paths we cannot track, many of which could be heading for Earth, and we just don’t know it."
But Luca told The Sun the agency is working with NASA to develop a floating telescope that will let scientists look straight into the blind spot.
Called Neomir – near-Earth orbit mission in the infrared – it will detect objects using infrared waves, rather than visible light, allowing boffins to see objects in the Sun’s direction.
Luca said: "We know of fewer than 1% of the objects the size of YR4. We’ve identified around 40,000 near-Earth objects, but there are millions of them.
“We’ve spotted basically all of them down to a kilometre across, but far fewer of the smaller ones.
“We still cannot see the whole night sky every night. If the telescope that found YR4 had looked at that bit of sky the next day, it wouldn’t have been detected then.”
YR4 sparked global panic in January when scientists raised its chances of hitting Earth in 2032, before slashing them again. Scientists now reckon it is more likely to smash into the Moon, though odds of that happening are thought to be around 1%.
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