A woman had a potentially fatal experience in Canada recently. As she slept through the night a meteorite, a small meteorite pierced through her roof and came crashing on her pillow. It barely missed her head, but created a hole in the roof. The incident turned the light back on the question: What if a rock big enough to cause large-scale damage, say an asteroid, were to hit Earth? As curiosity grew, NASA asked one of its experts the question. Dr. Kelly Fast said it’s important to find the asteroids “before they find us.” She, however, added there’s no known threat to Earth.

Sharing Fast’s response, NASA also said in an Instagram post that its Planetary Defense Coordination Office “keeps its eyes on the skies” to ensure they are able to find asteroids before they find us.

Fast, a planetary defence expert, said, “An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that could be prevented. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office supports projects to discover asteroids and calculate their orbit far into the future. If an asteroid impact threat is discovered years or decades in advance, then the deflection mission might be possible,” she said.

The meteorite incident in Canada’s British Columbia province was not the only one of its kind. Meteors lunge towards Earth all the time. Sometimes, the large ones survive the trip through Earth’s atmosphere and land on the surface as small meteorites. Sometimes, people collect them and at other times, these rocks end up in museums or on online shopping platforms. In comparison to meteorites, asteroids are huge, although much smaller than planets. However, they orbit the Sun just like the planets.