I'm John Thatster with David Livingston.

This is Hotel Mars, continuing with Professor Richard Binzel of MIT,

who is working on a mission to intercept and accompany a near-earth object named Apophis in the year 2029 and for years afterwards.

That's Osiris Apex.

However, we're going to go back in time because there is speculation as to what happens if an asteroid such as Apophis or larger hits Earth? What are the secondary tertiary events?

What do we learn from the event that happened that is said to be the death of the dinosaurs? It happened

at the Yucatan Peninsula near the edge where there was a shallow sea, now called Chichuilube.

And the strike was, at a certain angle we can measure, at a certain speed we can measure.

And I believe it was a very large chunk of something like a broken up planet, a very large asteroid.

I've never had the exact size, but big enough so that

the crater was vast. And there's evidence of the crater all in that part of the world, the Yucatan.

Professor, that one day the dinosaurs looked up and this object came flying through the atmosphere

and hit the earth. What

happened then?

Well, first, I want to say that we have a space program, so this shouldn't happen to us,

but the dinosaurs didn't. And what happened on that bad day for the dinosaurs is that about

a 10-kilometer-sized asteroid came entering through the Earth's

atmosphere.

For an asteroid as large as that, the atmosphere doesn't matter.

The atmosphere doesn't protect us.

And effectively, that object struck the Earth with a full force.

It was traveling maybe 20 or 30 kilometers a second

...