The explosion of a truck-size asteroid over Chelyabinsk, Russia, this past February —which blew out windows throughout the entire city and injured more than 1,000 people —helped draw public attention to what the panelists described as the often-overlooked and underappreciated threat to the planet.
"It did make a difference in policymakers realizing that this is not just a science-fiction concept, or something that will happen in 100 or 500 years in the future," Thomas Jones, former NASA astronaut and senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, told SPACE.com at the news conference. "The fact that it happened right now, I think, enforced the reality."
The recommendations that the group presented to the United Nations this week provide an outline of what governments will ultimately implement in the event of an emergency. However, the details of these recommendations are still in the works, Schweickart said.
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Topic: Global Effort Needed to Defend Earth from Asteroids, Astronauts Tell UN (Read 730 times)