If the asteroid slams into Mars , the impact will most likely occur in the equatorial area, where Opportunity rover has been exploring the red planet since 2004.

Astronomers detected Asteroid 2007 WD5 at the end of November 2007. It is currently flying halfway between Earth and Mars.

The above-mentioned Meter Crater in Arizona was created about 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch when the local climate on the Colorado Plateau was much cooler and damper. At the time, the area was an open grassland dotted with woodlands inhabited by woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camels. It was uninhabited by humans, the first of whom are thought to have reached North America only around 13,000 years ago.

The impact produced a massive explosion equivalent to at least 2.5 megatons of TNT – equivalent to a large thermonuclear explosion and about 150 times the yield of the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki . The explosion dug out 175 million tons of rock. The shock of impact propagated as a hemispherical shock wave that blasted the rock down and outward from the point of impact, forming the crater. Much more impact energy, equivalent to an estimated 6.5 megatons, was released into the atmosphere and generated a devastating above-ground shockwave.

The Tunguska meteorite, or the Siberian rock , is the largest meteorite explosion in recent history. The mysterious impact occurred in 1908 in Russia’s Siberia.

 Source : Pravda.ru