Asteroid 'Apophis' Won't Kill Us All in 2036, LOL

Congrats! Come 2036, you'll still be here – as opposed to being blown apart by a giant asteroid that was initially thought to have a great-than-zero chance of striking Earth when it swings around in 2036.

Asteroid 'Apophis' Won't Kill Us All in 2036, LOL 371362apophisasteroid

Well, you might not still be here – who knows! – but the Earth should still be around and intact. NASA scientists have officially ruled that the asteroid Apophis, an approximately 885-foot-long hunk of rock that just passed within nine million miles of Earth this past Wednesday, will not be the herald of humanity's doom come 20 or so years from now. That's a bit more of a relief than the approximate 2.7 percent chance scientists had first assigned as a strike probability to Apophis when the asteroid was discovered in 2004.

"The impact odds as they stand now are less than one in a million, which makes us comfortable saying we can effectively rule out an Earth impact in 2036. Our interest in asteroid Apophis will essentially be for its scientific interest for the foreseeable future," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, in a statement.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414233,00.asp

Asteroid 'Apophis' Won't Kill Us All in 2036, LOL

Asteroid 'Apophis' Won't Kill Us All in 2036, LOL

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