NASA chief says serious meteor threats to Earth are real; ‘This is not about Hollywood’

Space agency Administrator Jim Bridenstine said governments are not taking the risks of meteor impacts on Earth seriously enough, according to NBC News.

"This is not about Hollywood, this is not about movies. This is about ultimately protecting the only planet we know right now to host life," Brindenstine said during a speech Monday at the Planetary Defense Conference in Washington, NBC reported.

Bridenstine revealed that after a meteorite exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 with “30 times the energy of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima,” injuring some 1,500 residents, NASA tracked an even larger object that missed the Earth.

"I wish I could tell you that these events are exceptionally unique, but they are not," Bridenstine said, according to CNN. "These events are not rare. They happen. It's up to us to make sure that we are characterizing, detecting, tracking all of the near-Earth objects that could be a threat to the world."

Bridenstine said NASA modeling has predicted serious meteorite crashes will happen every 60 years and that three have crashed into the planet over the last century.

Bridenstine is calling for better systems to detect and track potentially threatening near-Earth objects, and he's advocating for a global effort on this front.