Slashdot Mirror
A Rock Moves In Space
theBrownfury writes: "The BBC is reporting here that
a very large Earth collision course asteroid has been discovered. This asteroid, NT7,
was first observed on July 5th and current data suggests an impact date of
February 1st, 2019. NT7 is 2kms wide and on date of impact will be approaching
Earth at 28km/s. An asteroid of this size is large enough to cause continent
wide destruction. However astronomers are still cautious in reporting this
asteroid as the orbit of NT7 has not been fully verified. Current data on
NT7's orbit suggests it orbits the Sun every 837 days and travels in a tilted
orbit from about the distance of Mars to just within the Earth's orbit." The BBC article's headline (and accompanying illustration) are more alarming than the story itself seems to warrant: this asteroid has been given a 0.06 on the Palermo technical scale, which means it shouldn't bump getting run over by a llama off your list of worries.
He has experience with this sorta thing and if the Die Hard movies and Unbreakable have tough us one thing...it's that you can't kill the SOB no matter what you try. I'll bet in Aramageddon II he comes back as a ghost to help destroy another planet killer.
Ruger
We all knew that NT4 and NT5 were bad, but when Microsoft releases NT7 in 2019 the world will be plunged into chaos!
According to the BBC story, this is the first rock to get a positive value, so does that mean that previously we should've been less and less worried about astroids each day before it?