If you were to gauge humanity by the quantity of our disaster movies, the fear that an asteroid will hit planet Earth looms large — and perhaps rightly so, given this planet's geologic history. Even if blockbusters like "Armageddon" and "Don't Look Up" weren't around to remind us of what such a cosmic emergency might do to Earth, scientists know that an extinction-level asteroid is inevitable in the future history of our planet. (This is no doubt a big reason why NASA attracted significant attention when it announced plans to develop a robotic probe that could avert an asteroid's impact, and why there was such celebration when the DART satellite proved successful.)
