Don’t look up: is an asteroid heading for Earth?

In a case of life imitating art, a 100-metre-wide asteroid has
triggered global planetary defence procedures for the first time,
after telescope observations revealed it had a chance of colliding
with Earth in 2032. To find out what happens now and how worried we
should be, Ian Sample hears from Richard Binzel, a professor of
planetary sciences at MIT and inventor of the Torino scale, which
is used to categorise the threat posed by objects such as asteroids
and comets. Help support our independent journalism at
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