Stanford professor wants to find asteroids that threaten Earth

Stanford Report, March 11, 2013 - Several large asteroids have zipped dangerously close to Earth in the past month. Scott Hubbard is part of a team that plans to track down future threats. On Saturday, an asteroid the size of one and a half football fields flew within 240,000 miles of Earth. If the space rock had hit land, it would have leveled an area the size of San Francisco Bay. If it had hit the Pacific Ocean, the impact would have sent a tsunami to every facing shore. But what is perhaps most alarming about this particular asteroid, called 2013 ET, is that, until March 3, no one had any idea it was headed toward Earth. Scott Hubbard , a consulting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford, thinks we can do something about that.