by Acad. Lev ZELENY, director of the RAS Institute of Space Research; Viktor YESIN, Colonel-General, rtd, former, head of the chief Staff of Strategic Rocket Forces, Professor of the Department of World Politics, Lomonosov Moscow State University; Acad. Andrei KOKOSHIN, Dean of the World Politics Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University A great meteorite exploded on the 15th of February 2013 over Chelyabinsk, making a thousand people wounded and their homes damaged, with windows smashed and all that. The mass of this fireball is estimated at 7 to 10 thousand tons. It means that asteroids, or tiny planets, pose a real threat. A larger cosmic body may cause even greater destruction should it hit urban areas and, in a worst-case scenario, threaten the very existence of the human race. стр. 31 Over these last twenty or twenty-five years we have collected a large body of evidence on asteroids (planetoids, minor planets) thanks to vigorous ground and space studies. Many astrophysicists conclude that one such space body may plunge to earth in a violent explosion someday. The threat is quite real. The available knowledge and technologies are not sufficient yet so as to predict this threat and react accordingly. We are still unable to collate it with other global dangers. We need far more data for detecting small cosmic objects and making early warnings. There is a large class of asteroids and other celestial bodies crossing the earth's path and/or approaching it. Given certain conditions, they may hit our planet and inflict grave damage. True, this is only a possibility of collision: asteroids revolve in stationary orbits way out of the earth's path and thus cannot collide with the globe. And yet there are planetoids that may approach it to a distance equal to several radii of the lunar orbit and get even closer. A gravitational pull of the earth and/or the moon may cause an asteroid to change its orbit and thus increase the probabili ... Читать далее