There have been plenty of movies, books, and TV shows that involve a plot point concerning an asteroid coming toward Earth. In almost all of these stories, the asteroid is massive and would destroy all life on the planet if it were to hit. Fortunately, the heroes always find a way to blow it up or deflect it or avert crisis in some other way.

Watching for massive asteroids like this is extremely important. Not just for protecting our survival, but for detecting non-threatening asteroids that can be studied.

While we have a long way to go to be able to confidently spot every large object that travels through the solar system, modern telescopes are doing a much better job than ever before.

The real problem is not the world ending asteroids, but the much smaller ones that could only cause local destruction. Unfortunately, those are also far more common than the big ones.

In 2025 alone, 191 objects were detected that passed by the Earth at a distance smaller than the distance between the Earth and the Moon. In October alone there were 30 of them (that were spotted).

These types of small asteroids are difficult to see from a long distance because they reflect so little light, making them nearly invisible to telescopes until they are nearly here. Just because they are small compared to world-ending asteroids, however, does not mean that they are no threat at all.

One of the ones that was detected in 2025 was named 2025 WV13 and it is estimated to be about the size of a house. At its closest, it passed by the Earth at about 24,000 kilometers (15,000 miles), which may seem like a lot, but when it is in space, that isn’t that much at all.

With hundreds of these asteroids crossing very close to our path each year, it is a serious threat to consider. One thing we have going for us is that we have our atmosphere around the planet, which functions like a shield. The smaller of the asteroids would simply burn up, giving the people on the ground a beautiful flash in the sky, but no real danger.

The larger ones, however, such as 2025 WV13 would almost certainly be able to make it through the atmosphere and crash onto the ground.

This type of thing does happen from time to time, causing local damage. In 2013, for example, the Chelyabinsk asteroid hit in Russia, causing significant damage. Fortunately, there were no fatalities.

In addition to the atmosphere to keep us safe, we have the fact that most of the Earth is unpopulated. If an asteroid is going to crash into the Earth, the odds are very high that it will either crash into the oceans or else into an unpopulated area of land.

Of course, that is not a certainty. If one of these asteroids crashed into a densely populated city like New York City, it could kill thousands of people in an instant.

The irony of this is that these small asteroids would be fairly easy to deflect if we knew they were on a collision course with Earth. We already have the technology to launch some type of missile at them to knock them off course and keep us safe. The problem is, we don’t know they are coming until it is too late.

Future research will undoubtedly need to be done to come up with a way to detect these smaller asteroids so they can be dealt with if determined to be a true threat.

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