NASA recently published an infographic revealing significant gaps in our knowledge about the threat of asteroids from space. The Planetary Defense Service suspects the existence of dozens of unknown asteroids that could cause global damage to Earth, and it speculates that there are thousands of smaller rocks, each capable of destroying an entire city on the planet's surface.

As a result, by August 31, 2023, thanks to the efforts of both professional and amateur astronomers, about 32,000 Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) of various sizes have been discovered. The Minor Planet Center, a key node in NASA's Planetary Defense System and the central information hub for asteroid hunters worldwide, received data from over 405 million observations. The main figures were presented in NASA's infographic from October 16 of this year.

From the presented data, it is evident that there is an impressive gap in our knowledge about asteroids with a diameter exceeding 140 meters. Only a little over half of the probable number has been discovered, precisely 10,541. Meanwhile, a single asteroid of this size is capable of causing destruction that could devastate the entire planet or a major metropolitan area. The asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk in 2013 was only 20 meters in diameter, but it still injured over one and a half thousand people.

Near-Earth asteroids capable of causing significant planetary-scale damage, with dimensions exceeding 1 km, have been discovered in a quantity of 853. Approximately 50 more of such objects remain undiscovered. It is believed that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid about 10 km in diameter. A kilometer-sized rock from the sky is enough to destroy an entire region with catastrophic consequences for the Earth's climate.

We can only hope that the deployment of new robotic telescopes, i.e., asteroid hunters, will help discover more potentially hazardous asteroids to life on Earth. Although they are dark and sneak by unnoticed, such bodies can only be detected in the reflections of the Sun. The more eyes search for them in the sky, the greater the chance that we will learn about the threat in advance.