Scientists: Asteroid May Strike Earth in 2880

ByABC News
April 3, 2002, 4:16 PM

April 4 -- The bad news is an asteroid nearly a mile wide could be on a collision course with Earth. The good news is we have time plenty of time.

Scientists writing in the journal Science say there is a one in 300 chance that the asteroid 1950 DA will collide with Earth on March 16, 2880. An encounter would be the equivalent of smashing a million tons of TNT into Earth and could wipe out a large city, trigger widespread fires and tidal waves.

Why worry about an event that might happen some 35 generations into the future? Lead author Jon Giorgini of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains he isn't trying to sound a warning bell.

Instead, he wants to get researchers thinking about how to improve predictions of asteroid collisions and how to prevent them.

"It's so far in the future that it's nothing anyone should worry about now," he said. "But it illustrates the value of understanding things sooner rather than later."

Astronomers Who Cried Wolf

Astronomers have warned of possible asteroid collisions in the past. Perhaps most notorious was the 1998 announcement from a scientist at the International Astronomical Union that a massive asteroid would smash into Earth in 2028. After much public hand-wringing, NASA dismissed the prospect as impossible a day later.

The uncertainty of Armageddon announcements generally comes from a lack of data. Although NASA has set up a program to identify and monitor all of the large asteroids that pass near Earth, so far astronomers have only located about half of these estimated 1,200 potentially hazardous asteroids. Additional observations often quickly reveal asteroids as non-threatening.

But asteroid 1950 DA is different. Thanks to a quirk in the asteroid's orbit, observation records dating back to 1950 and precise radar readings from NASA's Arecibo station in Puerto Rico when the asteroid hurtled by more than 70 million miles from Earthin 2000 and 2001, researchers understanding of this asteroid and its path of orbit is unusually complete.