2029, TEXAS sized asteroid and the end of the world!?

Question

I was watching a show on the discovery channel that was talking about an asteroid thats set to hit the earth around 2029, What do you all think and why the h**l do we keep pulling funds from NASA when this is what we need to start looking into?

Answer 1

Wikipedia has a good article on the asteroid from that show.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apoph...

Answer 2

2000, 2012 and 2029 are not the years in which the end of the world happens. Discovery Channel is evidently trying to improve rating with appeals to the lunatic fringe, and for them, it exaggerates data about this asteroid. NASA knows this is nonsense. Any competent scientist does.  

Answer 3

Please check out this link:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/apophis/

it is about predicting whether Apophis will hit Earth.

this is lifted directly from that link:

"While trajectory knowledge was substantially corrected by the Arecibo data, a small estimated chance of impact (less than 1 in 45,000 using standard dynamical models) remained for April 13, 2036. With Apophis probably too close to the Sun to be measured by optical telescopes until 2011, and too distant for useful radar measurement until 2013, the underlying physics of Apophis' motion were considered to better understand the hazard. "

the chance of it hitting is pretty small....

There was talk of it hitting in 2029 - but that information has been superseded.

There was a story about a 13yr old German kid showing that NASA's calculations were wrong, however, while he  took on an awesome project and did a good job, some of his assumptions were invalid.

In particular he assumed that Apophis would collide with an orbiting satellite.

There is an article in New Scientist:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn...

this was issued today

And there is an official NASA statement here:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news158.htm...

Answer 4

Oh, so now we're getting away from the end of the world in 2012, and pushing it back to 2029?  Come on, people, enough with all this apocalyptic garbage.

There are all kinds of things in space that could hit us.  this asteroid is only one of them, and if you actually paid attention to the show, you'd have heard them say that there's a SLIGHT possibility of collision, not a certainty.

Answer 5

Don't worry about it...the world ends in 2012.

Answer 6

we should get bruce willis and his oil drilling crew ready

and leave ben afflek or aflec what ever it is there this time

hehe(laughs)

Answer 7

No, it's not going to hit Earth, but it will be a near miss, passing under the orbit of some satellites. And it's a few hundred yards wide, not the size of Texas. It will be a once and a lifetime opportunity to see an asteroid with the naked eye, but otherwise nothing to get alarmed about. And several countries have programs to find and identify asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth and there's an international scientific body to assess the risk posed by particular asteroids. NASA is doing it's job:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/torino_scale.htm...