NASA scientist says 'risk of an asteroid impact is real' and urges people to 'think about' consequences

A NASA scientist has claimed the 'risk of an asteroid impact is real' and has urged people to 'think about' its consequences.

Professor Dante Lauretta is a planetary scientist who for the last two decades has researched and looked into undertaking a mission which would involve retrieving a sample from an asteroid - something NASA had never done before.

Professor Dante Lauretta has warned people to think of the consequences of getting hit by a meteor. (Getty Stock Image)

Well, in October 2020 the mission OSIRIS-REx did just that.

Lauretta helped collect samples from the asteroid known as Bennu, or 101955 Bennu, to give it its full name.

It involved a robotic arm gathering samples from the carbonaceous, a class of chondritic meteorites comprising at least eight known groups and many ungrouped meteorites.

While the team, from the University of Arizona, commanded the robotic arm, while they gathered the sample a plume of particles seemed to explode in dramatic fashion.

Lauretta has even written a book on his efforts titled The Asteroid Hunter, which was released earlier this year.

But while the professor is intrigued by asteroids, he is also cautious of them and the destruction they can bring.

In February 2013, a large meteor which was roughly 19 metres in diameter and weighed around 12,000 tonnes soared into the earths atmosphere over Siberia, in Russia, at a speed of about 40,000mph.

Miraculously, there were no fatalities recorded there were 1,491 sustained from the people of Chelyabinsk, in the southern Ural region of the country.

It crashed into the town of Chebarkul at 9.20am (YEKT - Yekaterinburg Time), and damaged more than 7,200 buildings, while collapsing a factory rood and shattering thousands of windows in the vicinity.

It was also estimated that the asteroid, which was completely undetected on its approach and had 26 to 33 times as much energy as that released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, cost Russia $33 million.

Should we be wary of being struck by an asteroid? (Getty Stock Image)

And so, Lauretta is sceptical of the future.

Speaking to Inverse, he said: "The risk of an asteroid impact is real. It’s small. But the consequences are huge. The event in Chelyabinsk really showed us. That was a true asteroid impact over a populated area.

"It was a really small object, as these things go, but it still caused damage. Hundreds of people were injured, and the property was destroyed. It woke everybody up.

"That reminded me of the comet that struck Jupiter in 1994. Same kind of awareness. We live our lives with our heads down with all our daily struggles.

"But every once in a while, you look up, and you go, you know, there could be something coming, and maybe we should think about it. These kinds of high-profile events catalyze a lot more activity in these areas, absolutely."

So, if a NASA scientist thinks there's a possibility of a fireball completely destroying our civilization and our way of life, should we be thinking about how we can protect ourselves a bit more?