Dr. Conca says that at 21 miles long by 7 miles wide, Eros, a piece of a broken up planetoid, is the second-largest near-Earth asteroid. Some of them are tracked, but we do not track all hunks that are large enough to cause grave harm, i.e., several hundred feet, that could destroy a large city. Space seems to be falling all around us lately. A geologic chunk about 55 feet wide (17 meters wide) with a mass of about 10,000 tons entered Earth atmosphere two weeks ago near Chelyabinsk and exploded with a force 20 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in WWII. At the same time, another asteroid, 150-foot-wide (45-meter-wide) passed within only 17,000 miles of Earth, inside the orbits of many of our satellites, that is, within our technology space, a virtual cosmic grazing. Not to worry, though, the smaller ones happen every century or so, but a big one does not happen for millennia. But the real big ones, like Eros, do not hit but once in a million years or so. The problem with these big ones is they tend to obliterate lots of species and cause damage in the league of an all-out nuclear war. NASA funding only allows us to track a few of these, so we will have a one-in-ten chance of seeing it coming. (Hint - let us not cut the NASA funding anymore).
On the other hand, humans might take ourselves into space in a pre-emptive strike. Dennis Tito, 72, a former rocket scientist, investor and the first private space tourist, has announced plans to send a man and woman on a 501-day round trip to Mars in 2018 when the planets are most favorably aligned.
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