[meteorite-list] New Asteroid Threat Seen (Asteroid 2003 QQ47)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:29:49 2004
Message-ID: <200309022035.NAA04447_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

>
> It has been an absolutely CRAZY day here in the UK since this story broke
> early this morning. I swear every radio and TV news programme has featured a
> "Doomsday Approacheth!" piece, accompanied by comments from "an astronomer" or
> "space expert", who without fail tried desperately to reassure the viewers or
> listeners that the scare was just that, a scare, and that in a few days time it
> would be shown to have been a false alarm... only for the presenter to wade
> back in with a closing comment about the end of the world, and civilisation,
> being nigh...

The asteroid was just a 1 on the Torino scale. The Torino scale was modeled after the
Richter scale. Should magnitude 1 earthquakes make headlines? No. Neither
should Torino 1 objects. It seems that anytime an object gets to be a Torino 1,
it gets hyped up in the press. There is no cause for alarm for such objects that
rank low on the scale, or for any object currently listed on our Risk page:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk

Asteroid 2003 QQ47 is newly discovered, and like all
of the similar cases before it, it will stay on our risk page until we
get enough observations for a decent orbit determination. It will then drop
off the risk page entirely (ie: no chance of Earth impact).

At least this time around, the press used the odds-of-impact number off our website
(1 in 909,000), which of course, is a low probability.

Ron Baalke
Received on Tue 02 Sep 2003 04:35:28 PM PDT