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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
NASA got schooled yesterday by a 13-year-old boy from Germany. Nico Marquardt calculated that there is a one in 450 chance the astroid Apophis could collide with Earth. NASA had calculated the chance to be one in 45,000.
NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.
The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.
And to think, I was merely struggling with the quadratic equation when I was a wee lass of 13.
