1 Space Rocks Impacts of our smallest neighbors

2 Asteroid Belt

3 The four inner planets formed, but Jupiter’s huge gravity caused chaos in the region past Mars. No big planet ever formed there Primitive Solar System

4 Craters in the Inner Solar System Mars’s Southern Highlands Mercury

5 Impacts on Moons Mars’s tiny moon Phobos Mimas, a moon of Saturn

6 Lunar Cratering Our Moon shows a history of impacts Most of these occurred long ago…

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8 The Asteroid Belt is Sparse On average, there are more than 1 million km between asteroids

9 Dynamic Collisions Do Occur And the effects are seen throughout the Solar System

10 Jupiter Shows Recent Impacts The world watched as a comet collided with Jupiter in 1994 Possibly not as rare as we thought. Other collisions have occurred since, like this one in 2009

11 More than 170 Impact Craters on Earth

12 Earth Erases History of Impacts Wolf Creek, Australia Roter Kamm, Namibia Barringer Crater, Arizona

13 Chicxulub and the Dinosaurs

14 Recent Earth Impacts Tunguska in Russia TC 3 - first celestial object tracked by astronomers before entering Earth’s atmosphere

15 Meteorites Chunks of asteroids sometimes make it through the atmosphere to the ground These are time capsules telling us about how matter came together in the early Solar System

16 Future Impacts Meteoroids smaller than a house will explode in our atmosphere 5-10 meter objects hit about once a year Larger objects are rare but devastating We don’t know when the next big impact will happen, but it will eventually

17 Can we Stop an Impact? Our best chance of avoiding an impact is having advance notice of a threat

18 NASA’s WISE Mission Using Infrared technology to see dark asteroids  WISE finds asteroids - including some seen for the first time  100,000s of Main Belt Asteroids  100s of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs)

19 The Challenge Could be Ours If we do find an asteroid headed for Earth…