BREAKING: Thousands of ‘City‑Killer’ Asteroids Threaten Earth… And NASA Can’t Find Them 🌏🚀

NASA’s head of planetary defense, Dr. Kelly Fast, has acknowledged that astronomers are currently unaware of the locations of thousands of “city‑killer” asteroids, raising fresh alarm about Earth’s preparedness for a surprise impact. These objects are roughly 140 meters or larger in diameter, and a strike in a populated region could cause widespread regional devastation, even if it would not be a global extinction‑level event. Fast told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that only about 40% of such near‑Earth objects have been catalogued, leaving roughly 15,000 sizable rocks still untracked, largely because they are dim enough to slip past existing ground‑based surveys. Planetary scientist Dr. Nancy Chabot, lead of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), warns that even if a threatening asteroid like the recently monitored 2024 YR4 were on a real collision course, the agency would have no ready‑to‑go deflection missions in orbit today. The DART mission successfully nudged Dimorphos, but experts say replicating that capability on short notice would require more spacecraft, more funding, and more political will than have so far materialized. NASA is developing a new infrared Near‑Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) telescope to push detection coverage closer to 90% of 140‑meter+ objects by roughly 2030, but until then, the real risk may be not from the dinosaur‑killing‑sized rocks everyone knows about, but from the intermediate‑sized asteroids “we don’t even know are out there.”