Child's Play

A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA's estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, 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 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right. (Full Story)

I have to say, those are pretty good odds that we will get hit. Should make for an interesting show, if it does happen. Side note: this reminds me of the time when the Mars orbiter crashed because NASA forgot to convert their numbers to metric units. (Why aren't we on the metric system yet? Trivia: Alabama was the first state to put up Kilometer markers on it's highways. . . The one thing we were first at and it goes nowhere).