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NASA Downgrades Asteroid-Earth Collision Risk

Posted by timothy on from the elephant-detector-working-fine dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid known as Apophis and now say it has only a very slim chance of banging into Earth.. The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields, and updated computational techniques and newly available data indicate the probability of an Earth encounter on April 13, 2036 for Apophis has dropped from one-in-45,000 to about four-in-a million, NASA stated."

1 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. NASA and risk... by itedo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_Commission

    "Feynman was clearly disturbed by the fact that NASA management not only misunderstood this concept, but in fact inverted it by using a term denoting an extra level of safety to describe a part that was actually defective and unsafe. Feynman continued to investigate the lack of communication between NASA's management and its engineers, and was struck by management's claim that the risk of catastrophic malfunction on the shuttle was 1 in 10^5; i.e., 1 in 100,000. Feynman immediately realized that this claim was risible on its face; as he described, this assessment of risk would entail that NASA could expect to launch a shuttle every day for the next 274 years without an accident."

    Well, it has nothing to do with the topic, but I wouldn't trust a statement "four-in-a million" made by NASA... ;-)
    There is no guarantee for a secure life on this planet. Asteroid impacts are a part of the nature, so everybody should be aware of those risks...