The Asteroid Apophis: Could It Hit Our Planet?

Risk of impact? 1 in 45,000, according to NASA: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html

That's not the same as 'probably' hitting our planet.

I'm not rushing off to get my offshore drilling team together again with these kinds of odds.

That looks like one of those asteroids that shares Earth's orbit. I forget the technical term for them. They tend to become synchronized with the Earth and don't generally pose a risk.

"This assteroid, discovered in 2004, will fly very close to Earth in 2029"
What? are we getting hit by a monster hemeroid?

That picture makes it look like it will plow directly into Venus, not Earth.

if the earths gravity does affect the astroid all it will do is swing the astroid out of the solar system. that is... if another planet doesntdo it first. and if not it will just hit venus like matt said.

The piss poor english makes me realize this is a credible threat. God help us.

The risk with this asteroid is that it's not yet known if it will fly through the "keyhole" in 2029 -- that is, a fairly narrow range of positions in which the Earth's gravity will deflect it into a collision course for the 2035 encounter. If it misses the keyhole, it'll miss the Earth in 2035 and (according to those who track this stuff and have the supercomputers to predict orbits that far out) for at least the next century afterward -- and, now being a known object with, by then, a *very* well known orbit, we'll have lots of warning if it becomes a threat later.

The concern at present is that, in practice, we won't know if it's going to hit the "keyhole" until after the fact, which would then give us at most six years to deflect it away from impact -- and during most of that time, it'll be far enough away from Earth to be pretty difficult to reach with anything but a robotic probe. The time to work on deflecting this body is *now*, when we still have a couple decades; there have been arguments that we shouldn't risk deflecting it *into* the keyhole, but with, say, ten years to push/pull it after spending twelve years developing the spacecraft to do the job, it should be possible to (for instance) deflect it into a for-sure impact on the Moon or push it into an orbit that won't intersect that of Earth for centuries or longer.

the term for objects that share earth's orbit is "trojan", with 5 stable points, forward and aft of the planet.

this was forseen in the bible code prophecies

Right... several years after the earth is destroyed (2000 according to nostradamus?) it will be hit by a large meteor.

NASA can claim ownership and sell the rights for some corporation to put their name on it.

Why worry, the world's gonna end in the year 2012 anyway.

I agree that we need to react to this situation when it arrives in 2029. At the rate of advancement in technology we’ve been seeing there should be ways to deflect it (like in an original Star Trek episode) or blow it to pieces (Armageddon).

The map seems to indicate that its orbit is traveling between the inside of Venus’s orbit and outside Earth’s. It will only be a matter of time before it will collide with Venus, the Moon or Earth. Even though this is fairly big (about four football fields in area) there are many other pieces of rock that crosses Earth’s orbit that may be bigger. The knowledge gained from handling this one may be invaluable if a threat from a much larger one shows in the future.

lol the world is not going to end in 2012.. its just a rumor someone started to get the least bit of attention..

Why do they make this look like a real news article?
I'm changing my home page! The headline looks like a real article, but the author could hardly write a coherent sentence. It's a joke.

Learn English grammar... then report the apocalypse. This is the typical crap you can find on at Netscape.com. They used to be good before the radical alarmists took over.

Actually, a7xfail, the correlation to the year 2012 is not a rumor. There are many articles on the subject, many relating to the aztec and mayan calendars..... not 2035, now THAT's a rumor......LOL.....

alll i gott to say is someone VERY smart better think of something in the next 29 years before something happens because i wanna live until iam 90.... NOT 45!!!!

I say we must take drastic action. I see that NASA didn't give US any information on this. WE NEED TO DO SOMETHING! Not just wait like we are doing now. OUR PLANET DEPENDS ON US!

This is Asteroids that will hit the Earth possible the end of the world because their are Bible refrence to it.

i think its going to be a very long time well not our life time that the world is going to end like come on people one morone makes up a time a year and a day when the earth gonna end now how do they no when the earths gonna end do the look into the future to they have data and facts about that i dont belive untill i see it

NASA needs to do something now.... we have the tech that has been proven to exist in our missiles.. we have to reconfigure it to move the asteroid and not destroy it.. make a lunar base... that way it can see the asteroids we can't! WAKE UP, HOUSTON WE DO NOW HAVE A PROBLEM ESPECIALLY WITH THE SPECULATION A LARGE COMET COULD HIT IN 2012....should we be concerned.. ahh, yeah NASA.

It would be nice to hear Nasa commment on this. As it is now, we are the blind leading the blind here. What do we know?

I do worry it could wipe us out. But i guess this can't go on forever anyway can it?
think about it.

German schoolboy, 13, corrects NASA's asteroid figures: paper
Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

I have reaserched apophis for a long time andi have never seen anything like it

Don't wory everybody. We have Bruce Willis for this ;)

BERLIN (AFP) - A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

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Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

AFP - Tuesday, April 15 10:44 pm,
and vnunet.com, 16 Apr 2008