How’s this for moxy… a thirteen year old student in Germany reviews some information from NASA, and finds a mistake in their calculations. Instead of a one in 45 000 chance of an asteroid hitting Earth, there’s a one in 450 chance.
Quite the difference, wouldn’t you say?
German schoolboy corrects NASA’s asteroid figures.
There are, of course, many millions of asteroids in orbit around Sol. Many of these orbit in between Jupiter and Saturn, in what is known as the Asteroid Belt. But others have have very elongated orbits around Sol that cross Earth’s own orbit. When an asteroid intercepts our orbit, they collide, and the asteroid becomes a meteoroid.
From the article:
NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.
The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.
Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth — and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.
If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.
I’ll say this: when our possible future as a race depends on the math of a thirteen year old, some is very very wrong. Or very very promising.
Addendum(dumdum)
Or Not… From The Universe Today, it seems as though this whole thing was a hoax. I am shocked! Shocked to find a hoax on the Internet. 
It turns out this story is a fabrication and AFP didn’t check the facts with NASA as I suspected. According to the blog Cosmos4u, they talked with Don Yeomans at NASA’s NEO office and this is what Yeoman’s said about the news story of a 13-year old boy correcting NASA’s estimates of Apohpis impacting earth: “We have not corresponded with this young man and this story is absurd, a hoax or both.
Just goes to show you can’t always trust the Intertubz, even if the information comes from a supposedly reliable source. Like a tabloid newspaper.
