- The chances of a recently discovered mile-wide asteroid,
forecast to hurtle towards Earth, actually hitting the planet are "minimal",
a Nasa scientist said today.
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- But if it did, asteroid 2002 NT7 would strike on February
1 2019 unleashing tidal waves, massive fires, global volcanic activity
and an electromagnetic pulse that would destroy most of the electronics
on Earth.
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- Astronomers have given the object a 0.06 rating on the
Palermo technical scale (a scale used to measure asteroid threats), making
it the first to be given a positive value.
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- Initial calculations show that its 837-day course around
the Sun - which tilts to just within the Earth's orbit - could put it on
a collision course in less than 17 years.
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- Donald Yeomans of Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory said
the margin of error was however tens of millions of miles, meaning the
likely threat was minimal.
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- "An object of this size would be expected to hit
the Earth every few million years, and as we get additional data I think
this threat will go away," he told the BBC.
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- An asteroid that hit New Mexico 65m years ago is believed
to have killed off the dinosaurs.
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- The Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, who campaigns for
the government to take asteroid threats seriously, said 2002 NT7 was the
most dangerous object yet seen in space.
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- "There's a good chance this particular object won't
hit us but we know that a large object will hit us sooner or later. This
is the closest approach we have seen so far," he said.
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- "It does sound like a science fiction story and
I may sound like one of these guys who walks up and down with a sandwich
board saying the end of the world is nigh, but the end is nigh."
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- Last month an asteroid the size of a football pitch missed
the Earth by 75,000 miles - less than one-third of the distance to the
moon. It was not observed until three days later.
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- Scientists said if it had hit a populated area, it would
have released as much energy as a large nuclear weapon.
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,762439,00.html
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