Giant Asteroid Raises Questions About NASA's Resources

Straight out of movies like "Armageddon" or "Deep Impact," an asteroid named "Apophis" is coming dangerously close to earth and could strike on April 13th, in 2036. Eerily enough, that's Friday the 13th. "When it does hit, it generates a blast that is many, many, many gigatons, not megatons, so it's thousands or millions of times worse than Hiroshima," says American Museum of Natural History astrophysics curator Michael Shara. The chances it'll hit are anywhere from one in a thousand to one in several thousand, but scientists say the effects wouldn't be nearly as catastrophic as the event that wiped out the dinosaurs. "The most likely target is several thousand miles off the coast of California and so what that'd do is just create a five-mile wide crater in the water," says Jennifer Bogo of Popular Mechanics Magazine. "Now, when all that water collapses back into the crater it'd send 50-foot waves barraging the coast of California for an hour, so it's definitely not extinction-causing but definitely not good for California." Right now NASA is working on plans to deflect the giant rock and though trying to blow it up, like in the movies, is a possibility, the more likely plan is much more tame. "One of the ways of deflecting it is by planting a large space craft right next to it, which will slowly gravitationally deflect it from its path. Just change its speed by a couple of seconds over the course of a couple of decades and you can get it to miss." And even though Apophis is now on our collective radar, NASA just released a report to Congress that says it has neither the budget nor the equipment to properly search the skies for all sorts of similar objects like Apophis that may also be headed our way. NASA is tracking about 75 percent of the large asteroids near us bigger than a kilometer. It's the smaller ones that have greater potential of slipping through. 'There are a lot more asteroids that pass reasonably close to earth's orbit that are greater than 150 yards in diameter," says Bogo. "So there about 100,000 of those and we've only detected about 4,000."