1,000 years of meteorite impacts in 30 SECONDS: Interactive animation reveals startling number of times Earth has been hit
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Just how regularly is Earth struck by asteroids? If your answer is 'not very often' then this interactive map might change your mind.
Created by Simon Rogers, for MailOnline, the incredible animation below lets you scroll and zoom around the world as meteorite impacts from recorded history unfold before your eyes.
Meanwhile, in an effort to mitigate against another devastating impact in future, a Nasa contest seeking the public's help to track incoming space rocks has entered its next phase.
This interactive map made by Simon Rogers using CartoDB shows where asteroids have impacted on land since January 1009 AD. Water impacts, which make up the majority of impact events, are not included
The map was created by data journalist Simon Rogers, and shows where asteroids have impacted over the last thousand years.
WHICH ROCK IS WHICH?
An asteroid is a large chunk of rock left over from collisions or the early solar system. Most are located between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Belt.
A comet is a rock covered in ice, methane and other compounds. Their orbits take them much further out of the solar system.
A meteor is what we call a flash of light in the atmosphere when debris burns up.
This debris itself is known as a meteoroid. Most are so small they are vapourised in the atmosphere.
If any of this meteoroid makes it to Earth, it is called a meteorite.
Meteors, meteoroids and meteorites normally originate from asteroids and comets.
Scrolling around the world, you can see where some of the biggest hotspots are.
And it also highlights how vulnerable our planet is to asteroids.
Nasa estimates that just 1 per cent of the millions of asteroids in our solar system have been found.
But, although you can see recorded impacts on land in these animations, most asteroids that encounter Earth either explode in the atmosphere or land at sea.
This means the vast majority are unrecorded and, as we don't know the location of every asteroid in the solar system, we're not sure when one will next it.
The potential for an asteroid to wipe out life on Earth has been highlighted recently by Nasa and other agencies.
In late April, an organisation of former astronauts known as the B612 Foundation announced that we are hit by asteroids more often than thought.
They found 26 instances of explosions larger than nuclear bombs, mostly in the upper atmosphere, that had occurred since 2000.
A previous map made by Rogers (above, click and hold to move) shows the sizes of asteroid impacts around the world over about 4,000 years, although this map does not have the time-lapse functionality
Barringer Crater in Arizona, pictured, is the largest impact crater in the United States. It is 0.737 miles (1.186 kilometres) across and is believed to be about 50,000 years old. It is thought to have been formed by a meteorite about 165 feet (50 metres) in diameter
This followed an announcement by Nasa in March that they would begin crowdsourcing ideas to track and monitor asteroids.
Known as the Asteroid Grand Challenge, the series of contests offer $35,000 in various awards to people who can develop algorithms to identify asteroids.
Last Friday, the competition passed part of phase one's goal of developing an algorithm.
422 from countries – from Argentina to Zimbabwe – submitted their algorithms to Nasa.
On 19 May the next phase of the contest takes place, tasking contestants with submitting their algorithms for analysis.
Nasa is planning a total of 10 contests this year.
This illustration shows the approximate size comparisons of two asteroids. On the left is the estimated size of the meteorite that caused the Barringer crater with a diameter of 165 feet (50 metres), while on the right is the Chelyabinsk meteor with diameter of 55 feet (17 metres) that fell over Russia last year
'For the past three years, Nasa has been learning and advancing the ability to leverage distributed algorithm and coding skills through the Nasa Tournament Lab to solve tough problems," the lab's director, Jason Crusan, said in a statement.
'We are now applying our experience with algorithm contests to helping protect the planet from asteroid threats through image analysis.'
The algorithms will not only identify asteroids but, it is hoped, discern their size and shape.
This will enable Nasa to decide if they pose a significant threat to Earth or not.
According to the B612 Foundation, we need to detect city-killer asteroids decades in advance if we hope to deflect them away from our planet.
Methods of deflecting asteroids have not yet been tested, but using impactors to alter their trajectory or 'space tugs' to pull them out of Earth's path have been suggested.
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