London: Experts at the University of Southampton have developed a software that can ‘predict' impact corridors of known asteroids and calculate the risk to humans, reports The Daily Telegraph.
There are nearly 13,000 asteroids, out of which around 500 of them have a chance of hitting Earth, says Clemens Rumpf, PhD student at University of Southampton.
He said, there was a one in 10,000 chance of one of the asteroids hitting just off the coast of Norfolk in UK in the next 85 years.
Rumpf who developed the software – called Armor - says, it will help organisations like the UN to decide whether to evacuate communities or send spacecraft to intercept such deadly asteroids.
An asteroid hit near a coastline can cause a huge tsunami wreaking havoc on people living on seashores, he said.
The new maps show a wide asteroid risk zone running through Europe, passing directly over Scandanavia, Germany, France and Spain.
The US is largely unaffected, although Florida and Louisiana could be hit.
South Australia is particularly at risk with several asteroid paths crossing the Lake Gairdner National Park and heading up towards Queensland.
The asteroid impact probability distribution was also combined with the Earth population map to produce the global asteroid impact risk distribution which shows that south east Britain is one of the most at risk areas of the world.
The last large asteroid to hit Earth was the Tunguska impact of 1908 which destroyed 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles, with the energy of 1,000 atom bombs.
Had the steroid fallen in central London it could have killed everyone within the M25.
The Chelyabinsk meteor which hit Russia in 2013 injured nearly 1,500 people.
The research was released on World Asteroid Day.
