Revenge of Apophis - Asteroid to hit Earth
Germany (AFP/NASA) — A 13-year-old boy who was participating in a scientific contest in Germany found a miscalculation in NASA’s documents which predicted that the chance of a near-earth-object, named Apophis, collision with Earth to be 1:45.000.
During his research for a project entitled “Apophis — The Killer” he found that the chance of the object to hit Earth is not as low as NASA scientist calculated, but 100 times higher, high enough to become a treat for our planet.
A collision would result a 320 meter wide iron and iridium ball with a weight of 200 billion tons. It’s predicted that the space object would land in the Atlantic Ocean, its shock wave creating a tsunami with unimaginably devastating effects.
The calculations shows that Apophis will collide with a satellite in 2029 which collision will modify its trajectory resulting that in 2036 to collide with Earth’s orbit.
Our question is that who made a mistake: NASA or the boy? NASA states on their page dedicated for the Apophis asteroid:
The study did NOT compute new impact probabilities. This is because key physical parameters (such as mass and spin pole) that affect its trajectory have not yet been measured and hence there are no associated probability distributions.
No related posts.
Comments
Loading ...
SHIT