Is NASA keeping the danger of a potential impact secret? – A 13-year-old German boy working on a science project recently corrected NASA’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid hitting the earth. He figured out that there is a 1 in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will hit us, while NASA claims that the odds are only 1 in 45,000.

Phys.org.com reports that both “NASA and [student Nico] Marquardt agree that if the asteroid does collide with earth [some time between 2029 and 2036], it will create a ball of iron and iridium 1049 feet wide and weighing 200 billion tons, which will crash into the Atlantic Ocean. The shock waves from that would create huge tsunami waves, destroying both coastlines and inland areas, [while] creating a thick cloud of dust that would darken the skies indefinitely.”

The inevitable question arises: Is this something that NASA doesn’t want us to know?

Meanwhile, NASA insists that Marquardt’s calculations are wrong. In the New Scientist News Service, David Shiga quotes NASA’s Steven Chesley as saying, “The idea that we’ve somehow been corrected is absolutely untrue. We stand by our calculations.”

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com

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