Know that space rock that wreaked havoc on the world in the 1998 action movie Armageddon? Well, that might have been fiction--but a new NASA study identifies about 4,700 “potentially hazardous” asteroids near Earth. Deja vu? The asteroids are on astronomers’ radar because they are headed dangerously close to Earth—within five million miles—and are big enough to pass through our planet’s atmosphere and cause major damage. In the image above, the bright space rocks have diameters of more than about 330 feet (100 meters). The study of potentially hazardous asteroids is part of NASA’s wide-field infrared survey explorer mission, or WISE for short. "We've made a good start at finding those objects that truly represent an impact hazard to Earth," Lindley Johnson, program executive for NASA's near-Earth object observation program, said in a written statement. "But we've many more to find, and it will take a concerted effort during the next couple of decades to find all of them that could do serious damage or be a mission destination in the future."
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