Schoolboy corrects Nasa on asteroid threat

A 13-YEAR-OLD German schoolboy corrected Nasa’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth after spotting the boffins had miscalculated.

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

Nasa had previously estimated the chances at only one in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the schoolboy got it right.

He took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13, 2029.

Those satellites travel at 3.07km a second (1.9 miles), at up to 35,880km above earth — and the Apophis asteroid will pass by earth at a distance of 32,500km.

If the asteroid strikes a satellite in 2029, that will change its trajectory making it hit earth on its next orbit in 2036.

Both Nasa and Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth, it will create a ball of iron and iridium 320 metres wide and weighing 200 billion tonnes, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean.

The shockwaves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, whilst creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.

The 13-year-old made his discovery as part of a regional science competition for which he submitted a project entitled Apophis — The Killer Astroid.

The work has impressed the head astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Professor Fred Watson.

“That 13-year-old German schoolboy has done a marvellous job because it’s one of those things that perhaps if you look back 100 years, people used logarithms for this process to work out asteroid orbits and hand-calculators and slide rules and things like that,” he said.

“The process took days and days, but it says a lot for the world that we live in that now a 13-year-old schoolboy can download the right software to do the job and actually find out errors in Nasa’s work. It’s quite extraordinary.”

Professor Watson says it proves even the great brains of Nasa can get it wrong.

“Honestly, it’s very hard to overstate just how good Nasa at this kind of thing, even though they sometimes get their imperial units and their metric units mixed up,” he said.