Killer asteroid just a space probe. Phew.

Posted: November 14th, 2007 | By Ray Hartley | Posted in General | Tagged as , , , , , ,
  • 3 Comments
  

IT’S good to know that the egg-heads sometimes get it totally wrong.
Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society was to make a big announcement today that “minor planet 2007 VN84” would miss earth by a mere 3 500 miles, timesonline reported yesterday.
But the red-alert was retracted when a Moscow scientist pointed out that the minor planet was, in fact, the space probe Rosetta.
So the threat of mass extinction receded and the Royal astronomers were left feeling a little red-faced.
So the next time you hear a doomsday forecast about an asteroid hurtling towards earth … actually, you should still panic.

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Comments

 

David Fagan

November 14, 2007 at 4:20 pm

Instead of panic, perhaps the private sector should do something positive before a real alert is issued, esp. as the only government who is actually doing something is the USA. Allocating a mere 4 million dollars a year to asteroid research. Considering it is estimated it spends about 7.4 million and hour, or approximately 200 million a day on the war in Iraq, perhaps it could be said this is a disproportionate allocation in defense spending. After all an asteroid is nothing more than an extra terrestrial missile.

 

James

November 17, 2007 at 12:55 am

No kidding, Dave. My website is frequently monitoring this stuff, and it is quite scary. One of those rocks hurdles toward Earth, and terrorism will be the last thing on our watch list!

 

fred

November 25, 2007 at 9:08 am

um shouldn’t astronomers know the difference between probes and asteroids?

pretty stupid move!

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