QuickCheck: Will a ‘city-killer’ asteroid hit Earth in 2029?

SPACE is a dangerous place for us humans. The absence of oxygen that we need to breathe, extreme temperatures that can cook one side of your body and freeze the other side at the same time, and intense radiation that can fry your organs from the inside out. These are but a small taste of the dangers we humans can face in space. Lucky for us, we are not in space. We are on Earth, safe and sound, except for a few adrenaline junkies we call astronauts… right? Wrong.

To paraphrase Rick from Rick and Morty, “Literally everything is in space.”

Earth is in space and that means so are we. Every single one of us is on a rock hurtling through space surrounded by other rocks all hurtling around us too. Sometimes, rocks collide.

Astronomers in 2004, discovered an asteroid as big as the Eiffel Tower is tall that is set to fly within 32,000km from the Earth. That is closer than some satellites orbiting the Earth right now.

If it hits us, it could cause an explosion equal to more than 1,000 megatons of TNT, or tens to hundreds of nuclear weapons – not enough to wipe out most life like the one that took out the dinosaurs but that could kill millions if it hits a city. This little bundle of death and destruction is named Apophis, after the Egyptian god of chaos.

So will this “city-killer” hit Earth in 2029?

VERDICT :

FALSE

Despite it being deemed to have an uncomfortably small chance of colliding with Earth when it was first discovered, scientists have since ruled out a collision.

Apophis is set to fly past the Earth on April 13, 2029, and return every few years into the distant future. But scientists monitoring Apophis, also known as asteroid 99942, have concluded that Earth would be dodging this whizzing frozen mud bullet for at least another 100 years.

Phew, that’s lucky.