Wednesday, April 16, 2008

NASA proved wrong by a 13 year old school boy

UPDATE: Please go to "Who's Right? NASA or the 13 year old boy?" to see the final outcome.

German schoolboy, Nico Marquardt, corrected NASA's estimates of the chance that an asteroid (Apophis) may collide with Earth.
He used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that the chance of Apophis the Asteroid will collide with Earth is 1 in 450.
Previously, NASA had estimated the change to be at about 1 in 45,000, but confirmed later that the kid was right.

How did the kid manage better than NASA? He took in the chances of the Asteroid possibly colliding with one of Earth's 40,000 orbiting satellites. If the asteroid were to strike a satellite in 2029, then its trajectory path would be altered, can will strike Earth in the next orbit in 2036.
Both NASA and Marquardt claim that the asteroid, if collided with Earth, would become a ball of iron and iridium 320 wide, weighing 200 billion tons as it hits Earth in the Atlantic Ocean. This would creating enormous tsunami waves, destroying coastlines, creating a huge dust cloud, and cause much destruction.

Apparently, this discovery was made for a science competition named "Apophis - The Killer Asteroid."

Let's just hope that Asteroid doesn't actually hit Earth.

2 Comments:

Rui said...

That boy recently got proved wrong by NASA officials a while after you posted this !

Bill said...

Yes, that boy was was proved wrong by NASA, and we'll have another post about it soon. Check back in a bit to see how NASA says the boy was wrong.
Don't forget to check back often!
SpaceTopia the Blog is a great source of great and breaking news in space!