Hi, we're here from Curiosity.com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes.

I'm Cody Gough.

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how scientists predict whether an asteroid will hit our planet.

Then you'll learn about at least one reason to get excited about math

from popular mathematics writer and Cornell University professor Stephen Stroggats.

Let's satisfy some curiosity. How exactly do scientists predict whether an asteroid will hit the Earth?

It turns out that there are actually a bunch of ways.

So let's talk about how asteroid hunters around the world scour the skies for icy comets and rocky asteroids.

I use the general term hunters because it's not just full-time scientists who are on the case.

For example, take the free initiative called Hubble asteroid hunters on the citizen scientist platform

Zuniverse. They used images from the Hubble Space Telescope, which has taken lots of

pictures of really big objects that are really far away. The thing is, once in a while,

and asteroid photoboms those pictures.

Those asteroid snapshots can be annoying

because they keep us from seeing stuff that's far away.

But they're pretty useful if you're studying

how asteroids move in space.

So the Zuniverse Initiative used images like those taken from the European Space Agency's

Hubble Science Archive.

And thousands of people looked at those telltale streaks to better predict the paths of asteroids through space, including whether that path might intersect with our planet.

More than 1300 separate trails were identified from some 300,000 observations and a lot of them came

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