Where will Apophis the Killer Asteroid possibly strike and when?”
NASA has recalculated the trajectory of asteroid Apophis and concluded that Bruce Willis can stand down from a state of doom-body-busting readiness. Apophis – agreeably described by the agency as “approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields”* – has got a lot of press since its discovery in 2004, when it was calculated that there was a real, if relatively remote, possibility it might collide with Earth in 2029 or 2036. Mercifully, a 2029 pile-up has already been ruled out, and near-Earth object scientists Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have now done more sums on Apophis’ trajectory, considerably widening the odds that we’re all going to die in 2036. Chesley said: “Updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036, for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million.” The pair got the majority of their new data from Dave Tholen and chums at the Univer
In the movie “Armageddon,” Bruce Willis saves the world from a killer asteroid by landing on the rock’s surface, drilling a hole and detonating a nuclear weapon inside. But that’s Hollywood. What could really be done about a similar real-world threat? A panel of experts at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco posed that question. Two years ago, NASA identified an asteroid 300 meters in diameter, dubbed Apophis. It will have a close brush with Earth in 2029 and a possible collision in 2036. And Apophis could be just the first in a long line of possible asteroid threats. Congress has ordered NASA to step up its detection of nearby asteroids over the next 12 years. While “Killer Asteroids,” the title of the association’s news release, sounded like a science-fiction movie, NASA scientist David Morrison assured the audience the asteroid-impact prediction was no joke. “We’re talking about real asteroids, a real survey, real circumstance
