You can relax: New data has confirmed that asteroid 2011 AG5 will not hit the Earth in 2040.
O goody: Scientists have concluded that a 460 foot diameter asteroid only has a 1 percent chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.
Observations to date indicate there is a slight chance that AG5 could impact Earth in 2040. Attendees expressed confidence that in the next four years, analysis of space and ground-based observations will show the likelihood of 2011 AG5 missing Earth to be greater than 99 percent.
It appears that they won’t really be able to pin down the impact odds for 2040 until 2023, when the asteroid passes the Earth at a distance of 1.1 million miles.
JPL has issued a press release “reality check” on the impact possibilities of asteroid 2011 AG5 in 2040.
“In September 2013, we have the opportunity to make additional observations of 2011 AG5 when it comes within 91 million miles (147 million kilometers) of Earth,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It will be an opportunity to observe this space rock and further refine its orbit. Because of the extreme rarity of an impact by a near-Earth asteroid of this size, I fully expect we will be able to significantly reduce or rule out entirely any impact probability for the foreseeable future.” Even better observations will be possible in late 2015.
In other words, we really will not know anything more about these possibilities until late next year.
Astronomers have discovered a five hundred foot wide asteroid that has a 1 in 600 chance of hitting the Earth in 2040.
“2011 AG5 is the object which currently has the highest chance of impacting the Earth … in 2040. However, we have only observed it for about half an orbit, thus the confidence in these calculations is still not very high,” said Detlef Koschny of the European Space Agency’s Solar System Missions Division in Noordwijk, The Netherlands.
