MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev for RIA Novosti) -...

He said that chances of such a collision were infinitely small, and that it was inexpedient to spend huge sums on neutralizing this unlikely threat. But it seems that the general may be underestimating the scale of the asteroid threat.

Over the last few decades there has been a great deal of debate about the level of danger posed by impacts from asteroids and comets. It appears that the world needs to take the threat of asteroid strikes a lot more seriously. Astronomers have already spotted about 800 asteroids, solid rocky celestial bodies, with a diameter of over 1,000 m moving along circumsolar elliptical orbits. However, there may be as many as 2,000 large asteroids, and some 135,000 rocks with a diameter of 100 m and more.

It should be noted that asteroid orbits are unstable and tend to change under the influence of gravitational fields of terrestrial-group planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. An asteroid, which flashed past our planet at a distance of 5 million

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