Into All That

While I love a good underdog story as much as anyone else, my stink-o-meter starts chirping like a cricket when I see headlines that use words like “NASA” and “corrected by” and “thirteen year old”. So you might understand my skepticism after stumbling across this report on spacedaily.com last month, reporting that a student entering a German science competition accounted for a variable in plotting the trajectory of the asteroid Apophis that escaped NASA scientists… a variable increasing the odds of impact in the year 2036 from a trivial 1 : 45,000 to a mortifying 1 : 450. The variable in question? A satellite. No, not like the moon; a satellite like the one that lets people in Guam watch Law & Order reruns on A&E:

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07 kilometres a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880 kilometres above earth — and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500 kilometres.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.

To help myself put that in perspective, I translated the statistics as reported into lottery odds. Basically, the report is telling us that this bright young man was predicting that, thirty-one years minus two days in the future, an asteroid stands twice the chance of smacking into the Earth than I stood of winning $275 with New Jersey Lottery’s Pick 3, as a result of banging into a satellite during a close encounter seven years earlier.

This is where the stink-o-meter went off. A satellite — like, one of the ones the space shuttle carries as payload — significantly altering the course of a reportedly 200,000,000,000 tonne (noting that tonnes are 10% larger than tons) hunk of iron? More importantly, the prize for a 1 in 1,000 bet is only $275? What kind of sucker plays those odds? But what about the bigger picture? If A) your odds of getting hit by an asteroid are better than your odds of winning the lottery, and B) your odds of getting hit by an asteroid will be 1 in 450 — an low not seen since the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event — on April 13, 2036, C) you’d have to be a dunce to not plunk down the kids’ college tuition savings in every Mega Millions Jackpot you can find with a drawing that night.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, respectable journalism had to go and ruin a good thing. If you’re interested in the gory details, this fellow over at cosmos4u.blogspot.com does a nice job of corralling truth from fiction, including a link to NASA’s NEO Program website that then links to this informative-if-low-tech animation: