Two days after the earth survived the Mayan doomsday predictions, NASA has revealed that an asteroid, feared to be on a collision course with the planet in 2040, now poses no threat at all.
Uncertainties about the orbit of the asteroid, known as 2011 AG5, previously allowed for a less than a 1% chance it would hit the Earth. But astronomers from the University of Hawaii have managed to reduce the uncertainties by more than a factor of 60.
That means the Earth's position in February 2040 is not in range of the asteroid's possible path. The asteroid, which is 140 meters in diameter, will get no closer to Earth than 890-thousand kilometers.
A collision with Earth would have released about 100 megatons of energy, several thousand times more powerful than the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War.
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