as a giant ball made of liquid molten. Over a long period of time asteroids hit the Earth at tremendous velocities causing them to join the molten and create a crust for life. After many years of this, the Earth was formed from hundreds of asteroids combined into one large planet. Asteroids are found to be one of the most fascinating and dangerous things in space. This is because it is difficult to spot every asteroid close to our planet and at any time an asteroid may be spotted very close to Earth with too short a notice to stop it. Today we find over 150 craters on our planet some being a few kilometers in diameter. If asteroids this big hit our planet today many living things would be destroyed within thousands of miles of the impact point. This is evidence that many asteroids have collided with this planet in the past that could have ended civilization. Today there is known to be about 163 asteroids that are flying through our solar system that are found hazardous to Earth. In 1997 a mile wide asteroid passed within the distance of the Earth and the Moon when it came 40,000 km from hitting us. This seems to be a lot of room to spare but it isnt when you take into account the vast amount of space in our solar system. Scientists believe that an asteroid is going to be the closest to Earth on October 26, 2028. Because of the danger asteroids pose, NASA funded a program called Space Watch to try and track asteroids close to Earth. All together NASA spends about $3.5 million US tracking asteroids. This gets very difficult because it takes 10 to 30 years of notice to track an asteroid on its way towards Earth. Asteroids are classified as hazardous if theyre bigger than 1 km wide and found within 8 million kilometers of Earth. It is very probable that a large asteroid will hit the Earth in the future because of the planets past experience with asteroid collisions. Scientists...
