German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures: paper

AFP via Yahoo ^ | 04/15/08

[spotbust1]

I’ll bring the popcorn!! ;-)

[Calvin Locke]

That's a Saturday.

Just do enough to get the extension forms ready.

If you're still here on the Fourteenth, affix postage and mail'em.

I guess you could affix postage before hand, since it wouldn't matter.

But if you did that, you might as well mail them before the Thirteenth, just in case...

[Deaf Smith]

"which is about 172 million tonnes. "

Is that English or Metric tonnes?

[RightWhale]

The odds of hitting an artificial satellite are small.

[mmichaels1970]

Why? Am I missing something?

Well...I'll be about 66 when the meteor comes and blows us all up. Sheesh...You work your entire life, you finally get the chance to retire and golf on weekday afternoons, then "kablammo"! The Earth gets hit by an asteroid.

[BfloGuy]

The story's wrong -- the kid's math was incorrect. NASA was right, after all.

[r9etb]

“Tonnes” usually means “metric tons,” IIRC.

[ModelBreaker]

Sure. Why not? Do you think that there are no outstanding students in public schools?

Of course you are right. Especially with a kid that is doing these kinds of computations at the age of 13. It's hard to ruin that kind of mind, except with drugs or violence or some such. That sort of brain will pretty much educate itself in whatever it is interested in.

[mmichaels1970]

The story's wrong -- the kid's math was incorrect. NASA was right, after all.

Thank you. I can once again look forward to many years worth of Social Security checks!

[Erasmus]

Don’t you have to use

0.03937007874015748031496062992126

?

< }B^)

[Erasmus]

Something here doesn't make sense to me.

The article seems to be saying that taking the probability of hitting a high-orbit satellite into account increases the probability of the asteroid hitting the Earth from 1/45000 to 1/450.

That would require that the probability of the asteroid hitting an Earth satellite is at least 1/450. Given that a large proportion of asteroid-satellite collisions would not knock the asteroid into the earth-collision "keyhole," one would think that this fellow calculated the probability of the asteroid-satellite collision at many times 1/450, maybe even 1/1.

Now I ask you, is a probability of the asteroid hitting an Earth satellite of 1/450 even the slightest bit plausible?

The revision of the probability of an Earth collision upwards to 1/450 must be due to considerations other than what the article, or at least the excerpt states.

[Abathar]

If I was going to build a mold for a part that went around the world yes. For anything inside a couple of feet, or normal cavity size the extra 00787 falls well within our machines tolerances. (eighty millionths)

[Abathar]

I don’t think the numbers add up myself either. I can see the thing absorbing a satellite and having the impart slow it a tiny fraction of delta V, enough to cause it to be a slower orbit, but heck a small meteor with even similar mass will do the same thing. It must hit those more often than we can calculate, or shed mass from the solar winds that could affect it also.

[Strategerist]

As noted the story turned out to be false.

[atomic conspiracy]

This is bunk, hogwash, BS; and it is the media who take a black eye over it. Cosmos4U explains all.

[Red Badger]

http://www.physorg.com/news127634108.html

[Abathar]

Yeah, I read that it has already been debunked over at The Register. Still, give the kid credit for trying at least.

[Red Badger]

I think I’ll trust the kid...........

[Abathar]

The NASA we have now is certainly not the NASA our fathers knew, I will say that.

[SunkenCiv]

99942 Apophis (2004 MN4)
Earth Impact Risk Summary
[still 1:45000]
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html