Asteroids bombard our atmosphere all the time. Some are harmless, burning up completely in a flash of light, or breaking into bits of rock that scatter on the earth. But others explode in the sky with a great sonic boom, smashing windows and throwing people to the ground. Worst of all, some asteroids strike our planet head-on, blasting out massive craters and destroying everything nearby on impact.
An estimated hundred and fifty million asteroids soaring through our solar system are big enough to level a city. Two million are big enough to destroy a whole continent. Though scientists have found many of them, we don't really know where all the dangerous asteroids are or when the next one will strike. That's why a group of dedicated scientists are searching for asteroids in space, studying asteroids that have smashed into the ground, and making plans to prevent an asteroid strike if a giant space rock is found to be heading our way.
Join the award-winning nonfiction author Elizabeth Rusch and photographer Karin Andersen in the field for a meteorite hunt, to the edge of an impact crater to survey past damage, into a geology lab to examine space rocks, and to an observatory where telescopes probe the vastness of space, searching for asteroids on a collision course with Earth. It's a scientific journey that just might save our planet.
