Previously, on Unexplainable, you never know what the future holds until it hits.

Impacts are still happening in the solar system.

The threat posed by Earth orbit causing asteroids and comets has long been a concern of mine and of the committee.

NASA has confirmed a so-called city killer asteroid narrowly missed hitting Earth.

The dedicated researchers who find and track asteroids across the solar system are members of an elite squad known as the planetary defense coordination office.

Finding asteroids before they find us and then maybe getting them before they get us.

But how does one get an asteroid?

It's applied planetary science.

Planetary defense set their sights on the little asteroid Moonlit, dimorphous, with one mission in mind.

Give a little boop, you know like boop.

Humanity's first ever attempt to boop an asteroid.

Can we reach into the cosmos and defend a planet?

Boop.

This is Unexplainable. I'm Brian Resick.

And last year I talked to Robin George Andrews.

He's a science journalist and he's been doing a lot of work on a book about asteroids and how maybe one could hit the Earth one day and what we should do to stop it.

Most importantly that part of what to do to stop it.

And in that episode last year, Robin and I talked about what we call the asteroid problem.

So the huge asteroids that could potentially destroy all life on Earth, we actually got them pretty much catalogued.

Like we know where they are, we know they're not a threat.

But asteroids don't need to be enormous to cause problems.

So in 2013 there was a meteor that exploded over a city in Russia and exploded with more power than a nuclear weapon.

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