Resumen de Impactos sobre la Tierra
The Earth receives around 30.000 tons of material from meteroroids every year. Most of them cause meteor shower, some, fireballs and a few of them meteoroids that impact on the ground. The Earth is also subject to big impacts from Near Earth Objects larger than 100 m. In the past theses impacts have probably carried life to our planet but also destruction and large extinctions of species. The possibility of large impacts that could put into risk our civilization causes great worry. Some programs are currently underway to detect, monitor and compute the trajectory of Potentially Hazard Objetc. Two web pages list and classify the impact risk by Near Earth Asteroids.
There are some ideas to shift the trajectory of hazard asteroids but all of them require spacecraft technology currently not available. For the time being only a very few spacecraft missions have been launched to land on an asteroid or shoot a comet with a small impactor. In the future a big asteroid or comet will impact the Earth and by then, human being should have developed and tested a technology to avoid it. It will probably not happen soon, but we should be ready.
