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Generally, asteroids enter the earth's atmosphere, they burn up before reaching the planet's surface.
However, when they collide, they have a punch.
The Chelyabinsk meteor burned over Russia in 2013, traveling at about 60,000 km / h and injuring about 1,500 people.
It was only about 20 meters wide.
But the question remains: what would happen if a bigger one hit Earth and how would we stop them?
Although it may look like the plot of the Hollywood movie Armageddon, the mission of saving the Earth from a space rock is now a reality.
At the fifth annual conference on global defense, NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstone, announced the latest space agency program, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).
The goal of the American scientists involved is simple: to scare an asteroid.
The target: a potentially dangerous "binary asteroid" located at least 10 million kilometers away.
It consists of two parts: Didymos A and Didymos B.
The theory is that if you hit B, you can dismiss A from the course.
It will be launched in June 2021, take a year to hit or miss.
The cost? 400 million dollars. A good deal to potentially save our planet.
Didymos A, unlike the Russian meteor, is about 800 meters wide.
This is important enough that a collision can result in millions of casualties and millions of dollars in damage.
Threats such as Didymos This means that it's not enough to explore the space, but that sometimes we also have to defend ourselves from it.
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