Last week we wrote that a German school boy had found an error in NASA’s Apophis calculations and come up with much higher impact probability. German Nico Marquardt calculated Apophis impact probability to 1/450 while NASA estimated it to be 1/45.000. Current understanding is that Nico Marquardt’s calculation is not valid and this whole story [...]
Last week we wrote that a German school boy had found an error in NASA’s Apophis calculations and come up with much higher impact probability. German Nico Marquardt calculated Apophis impact probability to 1/450 while NASA estimated it to be 1/45.000. Current understanding is that Nico Marquardt’s calculation is not valid and this whole story has no scientific evidence.
News agency AFP had found this staggering news from German local newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten. According to the news, German school boy Nico Marquardt came up with more exact calculations of Apophis asteroid impact in 2029 and 2036. In his calculations Nico says that if Apophis hits one of our satellites, the probability of direct impact to Earth in 2036 would jump up to 1/450.
Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten claims that NASA has agreed with the new results, but this does not make sense because it is not NASA only calculating the probability but a world-wide team of mathematicians.
The reason why the calculations of the German student make no sense is that Apophis will pass far away from our satellite belt. Therefore it is not probable that the direction of Apophis will change due to satellite collision. For sure the amount of space debris will increase by 2029, but not so much that a collision with Apophis would be probable.
Few days ago NASA released an official denial of this news. You can read it in NASA’s website.
This article was written by Marko Pyhajarvi and its original location is in HomeboyAstronomy.Com astronomy blog. For more great astronomy articles, please visit HomeboyAstronomy.Com.
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