There are always a lot of
doomsday predictions about asteroids. NASA has us covered on this front,but
paranoid internet bloggers might argue otherwise. The latest scuttlebutt has us
all perishing in September. Regardless, there are a lot of near-soil objects.
This graph of NASA’s database on NEOs between 1900 and 2200 shows that these visiting
asteroids (and comets, or but those don’t fill a defined absolute magnitude,so they
aren’t graphed) are actually pretty common, and many reach even closer than the
distance between soil and the Moon.
Note there is some
observational bias in these data; we know much more about the ones that are due
to approach now-ish, or approached recently,and we can track much smaller
objects that are near approach with higher certainty. So the shape of the trend
is less significant than just the sheer volume. This database has more than 21k
just out to a range of 30 lunar distances!Data source: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/neo_c
Source: tumblr.com