Astronomy Cast - Good Podcast
Recommend you listen to this podcast if you’re interested in Asteroids. I’m concerned about “Apophis”, also known as 2004MN4 coming close enough to hit a “gravity keyhole” on 13 April 2029.
Should this asteroid hit the “sweetspot” the chances of it actually coming back around and hitting the Earth a few years later increases drastically.
Listen to the podcast which they talk about how these things are discovered, the chances we’ll get hit and so forth. About 1/2 hour show.
Update: I have one small issue with this podcast and Dr. Pamela. She sounds smart, but she also states the following:
We recently had a scare with the asteroid Apophus. It’s not going to hit the Earth. It’s not going to hit us any time. So, we know that it’s not a worry, but we thought it was for a while. The Planetary Society put out this call for proposals on how could you go out and put a radio transponder on an asteroid so that we can track it and get accurate positions over time. One of the first steps to diverting an asteroid is actually just radio tagging it, like you might radio tag an endangered species, so we can keep track of it as it migrates through the solar system.
In particular, “It’s not going to hit us any time.”
That’s a definite statement of fact, coming from her. Unless she has extremely accurate course information on that particular asteroid, then she can not say this definitively. As a matter of fact, at this point no one can say for sure it will hit, or it won’t hit ever, just that it is highly unlikely to hit us on the dates we’re expecting it to come close. There is a possibility it will hit this gravity keyhole and then all bets are off, but. There is a HIGH probability it can hit us. 1-in-10,000 in 2039 if I understood what I was reading correctly. This is not something you can take and say, “No it won’t hit”. So, basically, I disagree with the Doctor on this one point.
My take on this whole thing is that this is a pretty big chunk of rock. It’s about 1050 feet across. That’s a pretty good sized rock.
According to the research I’ve done over the past few days, this asteroid was removed from being very high on the Torino scale around August 5th, 2006 (That’s my birthday, must have been a present, huh?) and is now considered a zero on the scale. As such, it is no threat. Fine and dandy, since I personally do not have enough data to calculate the orbit out several more years, I can only go by what NASA says. Here is their link if you need to see it yourselves.
