Asteroids: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Saturday July 9 at 10 pm ET/PT & Wednesday July 13 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network

Will a giant asteroid strike our planet?

There are millions of potentially devastating asteroids whipping around us in the universe.  Asteroid hunters and NASA scientists alike are trying to figure out how close they are to hitting earth.  Asteroids: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly takes us inside the world of a small group of people who are trying to unlock the secrets of asteroids and save every life on the planet from a potentially cataclysmic event.  

Through the use of brilliant CGI, state-of-the-art technology and old-fashioned instinct, we are taken inside their race against the clock to find asteroids as small as a few meters and as wide as nine hundred kilometers.  And they just might discover how our planet came to be.

For centuries asteroids have been ignored by science. The poor relation to the planets and even their icy cousins, the comets, asteroids were caricatured as the harbingers of an unlikely doom. But the real story is far more weird and interesting.

Asteroids: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly meets the people and reveals the technology searching for the threat from asteroids, and discovers how this threat has evolved.  Initiated by the US Department of Defense Satellites, the hunt for the rocks most likely to cause global catastrophe is now a collaboration between leading universities, NASA, and even amateur astronomers.

Scientists have also made some very strange discoveries that could solve one of the greatest mysteries in science - how water arrived on Earth.  Recent discoveries suggest some asteroids are actually covered in ice.

In fact, the status of the asteroid has changed so much that NASA has chosen the asteroid for mankind's next giant leap in interplanetary adventure. Their mission, scheduled for 2025, aims to unlock the mysteries of these pieces of rock better than any telescope or robotic probe.

And while scientists have been busy spotting the big rocks, recent research suggests we should actually be more concerned about the smaller, harder to find asteroids. They might not cause global destruction, but the effect of an asteroid exploding in the upper atmosphere could be much worse than first thought.

Could an asteroid impact be responsible for life on Earth?  Will asteroids change the world as we know it?  Could they become a water source for space missions?

Asteroids: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly is written and directed by Dan Kendall for the BBC.