Posted on 04/16/2008 5:44:41 AM PDT by Abathar
BERLIN (AFP) - A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.
Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.
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.
Both NASA and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres (1049 feet) wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.
The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.
The 13-year old made his discovery as part of a regional science competition for which he submitted a project entitled: "Apophis -- The Killer Astroid."
I’ll bring the popcorn!! ;-)
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...
Is that English or Metric tonnes?
The odds of hitting an artificial satellite are small.
“Tonnes” usually means “metric tons,” IIRC.
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.
Don’t you have to use
0.03937007874015748031496062992126
?
< }B^)
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.
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)
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.
As noted the story turned out to be false.
Yeah, I read that it has already been debunked over at The Register. Still, give the kid credit for trying at least.
I think I’ll trust the kid...........
The NASA we have now is certainly not the NASA our fathers knew, I will say that.
99942 Apophis (2004 MN4)
Earth Impact Risk Summary
[still 1:45000]
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.