No, the Earth (almost Certainly) Won't Be Hit By an Asteroid In 2032

The Bad Astronomer writes "Last week, astronomers discovered 2013 TV135, a 400-meter wide asteroid that will swing by the Earth in 2032. The odds of an impact at that time are incredibly low — in fact, the chance it will glide safely past us is 99.99998%! But that hasn't stopped some venues from playing up the apocalypse angle. Bottom line: we do not have a good orbit for this rock yet, and as observations get better the chance of an impact will certainly drop. We can breathe easy over this particular asteroid."

Comments

well...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that's until the U.S.'s tolerance of gay marriage changes its trajectory.

Just more from Big Astronomy

[LNO]

It's all a scam. They're hiding the possible cure for asteroid impacts, because this way they can continue to get unlimited grant money from the government. They've already planned their off-planet habitat for when the earth is destroyed, but they won't admit to its existence because then the sheeple would question the purpose of those radio telescopes and interplanetary probes.

WAKE UP! STOP BIG ASTRONOMY!

Math. Sigh.

[The Bad Astronomer]

Folks- Please note a couple of math errors in the article (and in the headline I submitted here at /.). 1) The chance of it missing is 99.998%, and not 99.99998%. I misplaced a parenthesis when I did the math and wound up essentially getting 100 - 1/63000 instead of 1 - 1/63000. D'oh. 2) Also, the original circle I drew in the article was too big. This one makes me smile wryly: I first drew up the analogy as the circular cross-sectional area of a target region in space versus the cross-section of the Earth. Both are circles. However, a pixel is square! So my circle was too wide by a factor of the square root of pi, since the radius of the circle is the sqrt(area/pi). Put in 63,000 pixels for the area and the radius is 141. I corrected the article, sent a note to TPTB at Slashdot, and beg the forgiveness of math pedants everywhere. :)