Earth's dates danger from deep space in late Feb

EARTH-BOUND: An artist's impression of the satellite moving towards the planet.

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New Delhi: Out of control and loaded with toxic fuel, a nine-tonne US satellite is hurtling towards earth. Experts predict it could hit us around late February but have no idea yet where precisely it could land.

But this bus-size satellite is not the only danger in space. There are more than 10,000 other pieces of space junk circling our planet: from four-inch wide spanners to 78-tonne satellites. Sometimes they damage spacecraft, like they did Kalpana Chawla's Columbia. Other times they simply fall to earth, like space station Skylab in 1979.

How do scientists take out a dangerous satellite? China simply shot one down last year and US and Russia have similar technology. Or lasers could burn them up - that avoids creating even more, smaller pieces of junk. Some even suggest futuristic gravitational weapons or huge blobs of Aerogel that could steal the satellite and its secrets before the US gets its hands on it. But that till now, is strictly fiction.

If you're worried the sky's going to fall on you, relax. Lots of space junk simply burns up when entering the atmosphere, this satellite probably will too. Only one human's ever been hit by man-made space debris. In 1997, an American woman was hit by a small, blackened metallic piece from a US rocket. She wasn't injured.

The greater dangerous is from asteroids though. Centuries ago asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs and in 1908, one destroyed huge parts of Siberia. One will give earth a miss tonight and another is headed for a close shave just six years from now.

With impacts more powerful than all the world's nuclear bombs combined, it's one of those that could really wipe out earth.