MAY 8, 2006 - Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards is an essential website for anyone with a curiosity about the potential for asteroids and comets smashing into our home planet. It's clear such things have happened before, from mass extinction events in the far distant past to prehistoric impacts like Arizona's Barringer Meteor Crater to the Tunguska bolide in the early 20th Century. Past being prologue, it's a sure thing that such events will happen again. What's not certain is when. NASA is working on finding out, and this website keeps you in the know. While things like the Torino Scale and the latest NEO discoveries might get your worry beads working, and popular news media delight in selling us pain relievers as they tantalize us with such prospects from time to time, the fact remains that NASA knows of nothing in the way of cosmic incoming at present. But that could change. Even then, odds are that even a moderately catastrophic asteroid strike - one that might kill a million people or more - is the kind of thing that only happens about once every half-million years or so.
