WATCH: Crowdfunding asteroid busters and monitoring solar storms

This is a video of a meteor above Russia’s Urals region last February 2013.
The impact — equivalent to 300,000 tons of TNT — shattered windows and injured over 1,000 people.
In a report on Popular Science, Copenhagen based group Emergency Asteroid Defence Project says it’s the smaller and “medium-sized” asteroids we need to worry about, not the big ones.

These smaller space rocks may go undetected until a few a short weeks before they crash.
Space agencies like NASA have the really big asteroids covered and are now fully capable of predicting an impact years and even decades ahead.
They add, if a medium sized asteroid hits a major city, the devastation would be similar to an atomic blast.
From 2000 to 2013, a total of 26 multi-kiloton explosions were detected around the world, all caused by asteroid impacts.
The organization is raising money through crowdfunding platform IndieGogo to fund an emergency back up plan.
The money will go to designing and building a spacecraft that could intercept and carry a warhead that will destroy that wayward asteroid.

Science is stuck at 60 minutes when it comes to predicting solar storms hitting Earth.
But industries that will be affected by the geomagnetic storm need more lead time than that.
NASA contractor Neel Savani and his team says they developed a better storm model that incorporates a storm’s early evolutionary stages.
The new model can give up to 24 hours lead time in solar storm prediction.
A solar storm can disrupt GPS and high-frequency communications which can disrupt aviation.
It can disrupt power grids causing radio blackouts and citywide loss of power.

Matthew Ang, Rappler, Manila. – Rappler.com