Asteroids Research Paper

All it takes is one asteroid to make all life on earth go extinct. 65 million years ago one such asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Despite their destructive reputation, there is more to asteroids than meets the eye. Through modern scientific research we now know the origins, makeup, composition, and potential of these fascinating space rocks. Ironically, even though asteroids could be the end of humanity they could also be its savior.

Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. When the Sun was forming, tons of dust and gas from the formation stuck together creating asteroids. Asteroids are planetesimals, the building blocks of planets. The asteroids collide and stick together over thousands

Layers of rock and minerals wrap around the dense metal core of the asteroids, similar to planets. Inside the asteroid there are glass like veins running all throughout the outer layer of the rock. These massive space rocks are also jam packed with carbon compounds that could have played a crucial role in seeding our planet with the raw ingredients of life. Studying asteroids can, and has, given us clues as to how our solar system came to be. Asteroids are rocky objects, varying from the size of automobiles to the size of a city. Some asteroids are a few feet wide, like the 6-foot-wide space rock “2015 TC25,” which was observed when it made a close flyby of Earth in October 2015, while others are thousands of times larger reaching hundreds of miles wide like Ceres, which is 583 miles across. Some asteroids are blown out comets (large asteroid like objects, composed mostly of ice). When the ice is gone, all that remains is the rocky material. However, in asteroids like Ceres, beneath its thin dusty crust there is a thick layer of ice and water reaching deep into the

Even though the mass of all the asteroids is less than that of Earth's moon, asteroids can be extremely dangerous. Over a hundred tons of dust and rock bombard the earth from space each year, most of it going unnoticed. The largest asteroid that we know of that has entered the atmosphere, qualifying it as a meteor, hit earth millions of years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. This asteroid created a crater 9,826 mi² wide off the Gulf of Mexico near a town called Chicxulub. The meteor came down onto Earth at a slight angle which caused tons of debris to shoot up and cover the entire Earth’s atmosphere, causing Earth to experience an ice age that resulted in many living things to die. The asteroid like the one that killed the dinosaurs only happens once every 10 million years or less. In 1908, an asteroid not nearly as bad as the one that killed the dinosaurs but still extremely bad, and the worst asteroid we have ever had in recent history hit the Earth in Tunguska, Russia. This meteor created an explosive impact comparable to a fusion bomb. Astronomers estimate that impacts at that size happen once every few hundred years. Even though there is a very small chance of us getting hit by a meteor that will do any substantial damage any time soon, there is still the chance that an asteroid will hit the Earth unexpectedly. Jupiter holds the asteroid belt in place because of