Plenty of asteroids can survive their fiery plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere. If they’re big enough, they can prove incredibly destructive, like the 60-foot Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over the southern Ural region in Russia in 2013, releasing a blast equivalent to 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
And in case an even larger space rock were to ever threaten humanity, we’d have to get creative to keep it from colliding with our planet. Crashing a spacecraft into it like a pool ball to redirect its path — just like NASA did with its proof of concept Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission in 2022— may not always be on the table, given the many uncertainties involved.
