The asteroid impact hazard and interdisciplinary issues

Abstract

Sometime in the foreseeable future, perhaps during this decade or maybe not until our great-great-grandchildren are adults, an asteroid the size of a large building will crash into the Earth's atmosphere, exploding in an air-burst with the force of megatons or more of TNT. Most likely, such an event will happen over an ocean or sparsely populated desert; but, if it occurs over an urban area, the consequences could be very destructive and deadly. Actually, small strikes by cosmic grains of sand happen all the time (witness meteors or shooting stars, visible in a dark, clear sky several times an hour) and every year many large rocks, called meteorites, survive their atmospheric plunge to be collected and exhibited in museums. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.