Though too small to end civilization-unlike the asteroid that may have doomed the dinosaurs -Apophis could pack a punch comparable to a large nuclear weapon.
But that tense day, December 26, 2004, stunned the small group of astronomers who dutifully detect and plot trajectories of hundreds of thousands of the millions of chunks of rock whizzing around the solar system. And April 13, 2036, it will return-this time with a 1-in-45,000 chance of hitting somewhere on a line stretching from the Pacific Ocean near California to Central America.īecause Apophis was discovered during one of the world’s greatest natural disasters, the worries about the impact went largely unnoticed. Nonetheless, in 2029 the asteroid, dubbed Apophis-derived from the Egyptian god Apep, the destroyer who dwells in eternal darkness-will zoom closer to Earth than the world’s communications satellites do. “This was absolutely extraordinary-I didn’t expect to see anything like it in my career.” By the end of the day on December 27, 2004, to the relief of the observers, archival data turned up trajectory information that rendered the odds of a collision nil. “We usually deal with one chance in a million,” recalls Steven Chesley at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Furiously crunching numbers on their computers, the researchers put the odds of impact in the year 2029 at exactly those of hitting the number in a game of roulette: 1 in 37. They had inside intelligence that a chunk of rock and metal, roughly 1,300 feet wide, was hurtling toward a possible collision with the most populated swath of Earth-Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. In 2004, as a massive tsunami roiled through the Indian Ocean killing hundreds of thousands of people, a dozen or so scientists quietly confronted an impending disaster potentially even more lethal.
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