This area will cover relevant news of the threat to the planet from Near Earth Objects (NEOs) including concepts and designs for mitigation. All opinions are those of the author.

16 April 2008

Update on Nico Marquardt (13 year old saying 1 in 450 chance of Apophis hitting the Earth in 2036)


Student Nico Marquardt (13) from Potsdam holds a lump iron in his hand. In the background, the "3-body formula," with the convergence of asteroids.

Ok. Some updates on this story. It looks like more media are picking up this story all over the world. Some articles are actually getting scientific commentators to back up the story in some ways. I have found the German article that talks about this and have provided a translation link from Goggle below.

Link: Original German Article on Nico Marquardt

Link: Translated German Article on Nico Marquardt

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:16 AM

    You have to be careful about formulations and alleged "citations" in the BILD tabloid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild

    ReplyDelete
  2. When the original story came out years ago the NASA scientist were quickly discredited and disappeared and a NASA article about how lucky we would be on Friday 13 and how fun it would be to look up and see this object skipping by came out within hours. Their quick and absolute denial of the original and this proposed calculation should make anyone pause. Anything can cause a change of course between now and then let alone a man made object. But the ethical issue is do we want to know. I'd much prefer a smaller window of 3 days or so notice of such a devastating event. The human race simply can't handle the moral realities associated with such an event and their will be chaos (notice present tense - no way NASA will be able to contain this in about 20 years when the should"a", would"a", could"a" 's come out). In any regard I applaud Nico for the braveness of it all. It's just too bad NASA doesn't hire him to help run their calculations for the Mars Rover campaign. I'm sure he'll stick to the metric system.........

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