T4W4 R Q16 – Selective High School

NASA asteroid detector 'looks up' to scan entire sky every 24 hours

NASA's asteroid monitoring system has been upgraded so that it can scan the entire night sky once every 24 hours for potentially hazardous space rocks that are heading our way.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) is essential for tracking asteroids and debris that could be on a collision course with Earth, and it is operated by the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. ATLAS began as an array of just two telescopes in Hawaii. 16…… — giving it a complete view of the sky.

17…… Such an image will give astronomers an unprecedented upper hand in spotting potentially dangerous near-Earth objects (NEOs) weeks ahead of a possible impact.

"An important part of planetary defence is finding asteroids before they find us, so if necessary, we can get them before they get us," Kelly Fast, the Near-Earth Object Observations Program Manager for NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, said in a statement. With the addition of these two telescopes, 18……

NASA currently knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000 asteroids; since it came online in 2017, ATLAS has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. 19…… The former exploding off the south coast of Puerto Rico and the latter landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, the two asteroids were small and didn’t cause any damage.

While the majority of near-Earth objects aren't as cataclysmic as the comet that featured in the 2021 satirical disaster movie "Don't Look Up," there are still plenty of devastating asteroid impacts in recent history to justify the expansion of monitoring. In March 2021, a bowling ball-sized meteor exploded over Vermont with the force of 200 kilograms of TNT. 20…… As the Chelyabinsk meteor struck the atmosphere, it generated a blast roughly equal to around 400-500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb. 21……

Six sentences have been removed from the text. Choose from the sentences (A – G) the one which fits each gap (15 – 20). There is one extra sentence that you do not need to use.

Fireballs rained down over the city and its environs, damaging buildings, smashing windows and injuring approximately 1,200 people.

The new telescopes in the array are located in Chile and South Africa and, along with the two original Hawaiian telescopes, can image a chunk of the night sky 100 times larger than the full moon (as viewed from Earth) in a single exposure.

Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit Earth.

But it has now expanded to include two more telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere.

ATLAS is now capable of searching the entire dark sky every 24 hours making it an important asset for NASAs continuous effort to find, track and monitor NEOs.

But those explosions have nothing on the most explosive recent meteor event, which occurred near the central Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013.

This was the first of a series studying the Earth's atmosphere and the Sun's influence upon it over an entire 11-year solar cycle.

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Six sentences have been removed from the text. Choose from the sentences (A – G) the one which fits each gap (15 – 20). There is one extra sentence that you do not need to use.