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Ed Yeates ReportingWhat do you plan to do come Sunday, April 13th, 2036? NASA is watching a 1,000 foot wide asteroid that has a chance of colliding with earth about then.
A lot of small stuff hits the Earth all the time, but the mandate Congress gave to NASA eight years ago was to start tracking some really big ones - a kilometer or more in size. NASA's been doing just that. In fact, it's identified about three-fourths of all the known ones out there.
One, named Apophis - after the Greek God the destroyer - has been calculated with about a one in six thousand chance of hitting us. Seth Jarvis at Clark Planetarium puts these odds in perspective.
Seth Jarvis, Clark Planetarium: "Have your child write down a number between one and six thousand and then have everybody in the family try to guess what that number is. Odds are pretty slight that you're going to get it. But on the other hand, would you put your family on an airliner if you thought there was a one in six thousand chance of it going down? Suddenly you would rethink, 'Maybe I want better certainty, something a little safer.'"
That's why NASA is watching Apophis, and its trajectory that at least as of now, would bring the asteroid mighty close to us in 2036. But then again, even it does hit, will it be in one piece? And would it hit on land or water?
If it doesn't fall apart, the big rock would flash like a pinprick on the globe. At a thousand feet wide, it would blast into the ground, leaving a crater about the size of Upheaval Dome in southeastern Utah. But according to Jarvis, where means a lot.
Seth Jarvis: "If it hits in a Kansas wheat field or in the middle of the ocean or out in the Great Salt Lake desert, you know, it's going to leave a crater a couple of miles across, but it's not the end of the world."
One in six thousand chances? It's worth watching, but only if the odds close in - like one in sixty chances - will it be time to consider pushing an asteroid off track.
