unclejimbo | More news about Apophis

Seems like someone at NASA has botched the math again. (Remember the Mars probe that burned up because someone didn't convert metric to English measurements?) Now it looks like this asteroid named Apophis has a 1 in 450 chance of hitting Earth as opposed to 1 in 45,000. That's a few orders of magnitude in difference.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080415/sc_afp/spaceastronomygermany_080415214429

I'm not the first to post about this, but my take is this:

We need to get a spacecraft up to Apophis RIGHT NOW! We need a way to gather the needed data about what this rock is going to do so we can begin the process of planning a responce. (No, the way they handled it in Armaggedon will not work. If we had only 18 days, we're screwed.)

We only have 28 years before this thing is likely to hit us. We have the means to stop it. But we have to do the work right now or it won't matter where you are, you will be impacted by this event. Humans will survive, but civilization just might not.