Risks from asteroids

Abstract

When thinking about risks from space, you’ll likely think of comets and asteroids. The asteroid that caused a mass extinction event approximately 66 million years ago collided with an energy roughly ten billion times as great as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Far more significant than the damage caused directly by the impact, it caused a cloud of ash and dust to block out the Sun’s light across the globe — eventually rendering three quarters of the world’s species extinct.