Who's Right? NASA or the 13 year old boy?

Looks like NASA did get it right! The story of an enterprising 13-year-old German boy, and his great feat in recalculating the likelihood of an asteroid hitting Earth which the Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the big American space agency acknowledged as being correct spread like a disease through the internet. It may seem incredible and unbelievable - and that's because it is.

Officials from both NASA and the European Space Agency did a re-examination and found that the kid was in fact, not correct, and the ESA swear blind they never said any different. One ESA spokesperson says "A small boy did do these calculations, but he made a mistake... NASA's figures are correct."

It seems that the initial article in the Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten, which says that NASA and the ESA endorsed Nico Marquardt's calculations, was incorrect. The story spread like wildfire, and before it could be corrected, it had already made its way into countless articles. (Including one of our own)

Marquardt apparently calculated that the odds of the well-known Apophis asteroid hitting Earth were not one in 45,000 as assessed by NASA, but rather one in 450. It seems that Marquardt's calculations included the possibility of collision with a satellite in some way not thought to have been covered by NASA, which bumped up the odds of a subsequent Earth strike.

Contrary to earlier press releases, NASA denies having been proven wrong by the boy, claims that they were not contacted, and have had no correspondence to the boy.

Apophis will pass close by Earth in 2029 and 2036, so close that it will come nearer than satellites in geostationary orbit. However, according to NASA, it is not a big threat:

"[The asteroid will pass] within the distance of Earth's geosynchronous satellites. However, because Apophis will pass interior to the positions of these satellites at closest approach, in a plane inclined at 40 degrees to the Earth's equator and passing outside the equatorial geosynchronous zone when crossing the equatorial plane, it does not threaten the satellites in that heavily populated region."

So, all of you people out there who thought the boy proved NASA wrong about the asteroid collision chances, here's big news! You may have seen our earlier post "NASA proved wrong by a 13 year old school boy", and yes this was basically the article that spread across the Internet. Now we know that NASA was right, and the German Kid was wrong.

The chances of the asteroid hitting Earth is still quite low then. In all, it appears that the Apophis asteroid won't devastate Earth after all.