NASA Revises Chance of Massive Asteroid Strike Down from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 450 After Being Corrected by 13yo


The chances of the asteroid Apophis impacting earth have been revised down from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 450 after NASA informed the ESA that a 13-year-old schoolboy from Germany had taken a factor they had missed into account in a science project.

The asteroid will pass within 32,500 kilometres of earth on April 13, 2029. The schoolboy, Nico Marquardt, factored in the chance that Apophis would collide with one or more satellites orbiting at up to nearly 36,000 kilometres in altitude.

The possibility of the collision increases the odds that the asteroid will crash into the Atlantic Ocean in 2036. If the 200 billion tonne iridium and iron asteroid hits earth it will create massive tsunamis and darken the sky with dust for years.

AFP: German whizzkid got it wrong: NASA

We pay NASA people how much???

More like ... we have ~How Many~ people in NASA that are politically appointed non-technically savvy people ? or We have ~how many~ affirmative action technicians who couldn't get the job except that they were the politically correct skin color so they got hired to fulfill some quota dictated by leftist liberal intellectual terrorists ?

guess well finally have use for those nukes. blast the damn thing to bits!

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that's almost 30 years for us to come up with a better plan...

and 30 years to figure out something else that's worse ...

the sky is falling

? That article says that they actually didn't get it wrong, and that the kid wasn't aware that the asteroid would not pass through the main belt of geosynchronous satellites though....

But I suppose the mere fact that a 13 year old made such a panic and caused the whole lot to reconsider their calculations says something profound about the agency.

Either way, how on Earth does a 1000kg satellite significantly change the trajectory of a 200 billion tonne asteroid moving at such speeds?

I'm just trying to figure it out... If it only takes this much to alter it's trajectories so dramatically, a missile should work even more effectively at greater distances.. So why don't we shoot it with a copper slug like we did with Temple1? Rather than paying NASA to dream up implausible mission ideas, put them to use for a month or three calculating where to impact the thing to move it out of our danger zone if it becomes a more threatening object in later years.

it is all so simple - we are all just an eight ball in a game of cosmic pool.

Being the eight ball is better than being the cue ball.

Yeah, I know, it's a small consolation prize.