Asteroid on Collision Course With Earth--in 100,000 Years
From Times staff and wire reports
The bad news: Italian scientists say a big asteroid called Eros is likely to hit the Earth, causing even more damage than the comet believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The good news: It’s not going to happen for at least 100,000 years.
Paolo Farinella and colleagues at the University of Pisa modeled the orbit of asteroid 433 Eros, which has a diameter of 14 miles and orbits at about the same level as Mars. They report in the April 25 Nature that Eros’ orbit is likely to bring it into a collision with the Earth sometime in the next million years. Eros is twice the size of the asteroid that many believe extinguished the dinosaurs. “A collision with Earth would have dire consequences,” they concluded.
