Don’t panic, but an asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032
More data will likely reduce the chance of an impact to zero. If not, we have options.
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That's 0.9% more than the last time I checked. I know those are still really low odds, but we can hope...
I science podcast I follow already warned last week that the probability would go up at first as they narrow down its trajectory.
They gave the example of a fan closing, as it gets narrow, the earth represents a bigger percentage of the remaining fan. If you keep closing the fan the Earth eventually will fall outside the fan and the percentage drop to zero.
Unless it turns out that it is dead center.
don’t worry, it’ll just be like a small nuke, not a planet killer… (until they update the size estimates)
One of the things they're doing is calculating what it's orbit would have to be to hit the Earth, and where it would have had to have been on its last orbit to be in that orbit
So they can look at any astronomical images of that part of the sky from then and see if it's in the right place
If they find images of the right part of the sky at the right time and the asteroid is not in it, they know it's not on an orbit that will hit the Earth in 2032
