An asteroid initially thought to have a 1-in-500 chance of hitting Earth in 2040 isn’t on a collision path after all, Gemini Observatory officials said.
An asteroid initially thought to have a 1-in-500 chance of hitting Earth in 2040 isn’t on a collision path after all, Gemini Observatory officials said.
University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy scientists using Gemini on Mauna Kea tracked the asteroid, 2011 AG5, and determined it was not a threat.
“One-in-500 sounds like not much,” Gemini spokesman Peter Michaud said Friday. “That is actually high odds for something like that.”
Asteroid 2011 AG5 is about the size of two football fields across, Michaud said. That’s a fairly small object to try to track, especially because it was fairly low in the sky, he added. Scientists made the Gemini observations in October. The team had images from about two weeks earlier, captured by the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, but the data from the earlier images were less conclusive, officials said.
“These were extremely difficult observations of a very faint object,” team member Richard Wainscoat said in a written statement. “We were surprised by how easily the Gemini telescope was able to recover such a faint asteroid so low in the sky.”
Had the asteroid struck Earth, it would have released about 100 megatons of energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs detonated in Japan during World War II, scientists said.
Institute for Astronomy astronomers Wainscoat, David Tholen, Marco Micheli and Garrett Elliott conducted the original observations and analysis of the data. Further analysis was performed at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory officials said the new data has reduced interest in the asteroid.
The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., is publishing the study’s data.