.. damn.. just damn.
Near-Earth Object Program: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov
Dang! Now we have to wait another 1000 years. :(
Too bad.
I was really hoping for a massive impact..
The path is as calculated, the error radius decreasing with each passing day. The asteroid will miss, which is disappointing since much would be learned about Mars from a fresh crater 1000 feet deep.
There’s a paradox here. Model this like a dart game with Mars about 8.8 Martian radii away from the bulls eye. Suppose the “dart” has an expected Gaussian distribution along two axes in the plane of the dart board ( The plane normal to the path of the asteroid which contains Mars )
Working in units of Martian radii, Mars covers an area of pi on the board, so the probability of hitting Mars is just pi times N(sigma,8.8), where N is the 2-d Normal Distribution as a function of r, the distance from the bulls eye. Note that N(sigma,r) gives the probability per unit area of hitting at a distance r.
So, using my handy dandy homemade yacc implemented calculator in cygwin, I evaluate pi*N(sigma,8.8) for different values of sigma, and find that sigma = 6.8 gives a value of 0.025 for the probability of hitting Mars. The paradox is ( if I’m doing it right ) that the asteroid has only about a 50% chance of passing within 8.8 Martian radii of the target point. That is, within the circle around the bullseye drawn at the distance of Mars. Intuitively, you would tend to think that this would mean a much higher chance of hitting Mars than 2.5% .
Another way of putting it is that the Normal probability distribution centered at 8.8 Martian radii which gives a probability of 0.025 for hitting Mars is much more diffuse than you would expect.
So, if it’s not going to hit Mars, where is it going to go?