redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports
A 140 meter diameter asteroid experts once believed had a one in 500 chance of striking the earth no longer presents a significant impact risk, NASA officials have confirmed.
Previously, orbital uncertainties meant there could have been a 0.2-percent chance that asteroid 2011 AG5 would collide with the planet in February 2040, prompting the scientific community — including David Tholen, Richard Wainscoat and Marco Micheli of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IFA) — to continue monitoring its course, the university said in a statement Friday.
Tholen, Wainscoat, and Micheli used the 8-meter Gemini North telescope, located at Mauna Kea, to locate the asteroid on October 20, October 21, and October 27 of this year. The data they collected was reviewed by NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who declared the chance of an impact 28 years from now had been “eliminated.”
“The updated trajectory of 2011 AG5 is not significantly different, but the new observations have reduced the orbit uncertainties by more than a factor of 60, meaning that Earth’s position in February 2040 no longer falls within the range of possible future paths for the asteroid,” officials from the Gemini Observatory explained. “With the updated orbit, the asteroid will pass no closer than 890,000 km (550,000 miles, over twice the distance to the moon) in February 2040, the time of the prior potential collision.”
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