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posted by FatPhil on Sunday July 21 2019, @09:56PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-behind-you dept.

Bad news: Earth is not going to be walloped by asteroid 2006 QV89. Good news: Boffins have lost sight of it, so all hope is not yet lost

Panic-stricken headlines claiming Earth will be slammed by an asteroid on September 9 this year should be ignored, the European Space Agency (ESA) assures us.

The supposedly planet-threatening 100-foot-(30-metre)-diameter space rock, dubbed 2006 QV89, was discovered in August 2006. Following observations over ten days, astronomers predicted it had a 1-in-7,000 chance of crashing into our home world 13 years later in September 2019.

With that date looming, experts at ESA and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) decided to take another look at 2006 QV89 this month, and used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), a ground-based observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile, to peer through space at the hurtling rock.

And guess what: they couldn’t find the bloody thing. Tracking asteroids is surprisingly tricky, you know, especially when they’re newly discovered and their orbit paths are not yet confirmed, as is the case of QV89. It's hard to pinpoint where they are in the vast obsidian void, especially more than a decade after they are first seen. Still, as we'll explain in a minute, the boffins persisted in their search because 2006 QV89 is a fairly worrying size.

[...] Since near-Earth asteroid QV89 was observed for just ten days 13 years ago – the same year Twitter was created and no-one outside Apple had yet heard of the iPhone – you can forgive the astronomers for being unable to find the thing in their telescopes this month. However, they didn't give up: by simulating the orbital mechanics of 2006 QV89, they identified the area of space the asteroid would have to travel through if it was to have a serious chance of hitting Earth. And nothing at all was seen in that region: so, no asteroid in that area means no real chance of it hitting our planet. Fingers crossed. [...]


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Monday July 22 2019, @01:28AM (1 child)

    by driverless (4770) on Monday July 22 2019, @01:28AM (#869789)

    Meh, we've already been hit by Asteroid TRMP-2016, this one would be a doddle in comparison.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @01:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 22 2019, @01:45PM (#869938)

    Then pray for both to annihilate each other.