NM Tech helps trim asteroid collision odds

SOCORRO, N.M. (KRQE) - Attention planet Earth: a big threat to life as we know it is now predicted to sail past our planet in 23 years.

The so-called doomsday asteroid is no longer believed to be on a collision course with Earth.

And we know that now thanks in large part to researchers in New Mexico.

The discovery of the 1,000-foot-wide asteroid "Apophis" in 2004 led to disturbing calculations and a fear the flying rock would smash into earth.

The numbers gave it about a 3 percent chance it would happen, the highest risk astronomers have ever predicted.

"The Earth would go around the sun seven times, the asteroid would go around the Earth six times, and they would meet up at the same place at the same time--April 13th, 2036," Donald Yeomans of NASA said last year.  "It will be important to look at this asteroid in 2013."

And in 2013 a giant telescope above Socorro did take another look at the space rock.

"We collected data with our telescope on Magdalena Ridge , and Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA does the orbit calculations." said Dr. Eileen Ryan of New Mexico Tech.

That data collected in New Mexico helped come up with new numbers replacing the earlier collision chance of 3 in 100.

"That possibility has dropped to one in a million that this object will hit in 2036, so we can breathe a sigh of relief," Ryan said.

New Mexico Tech played a key role in finding out that the doomsday asteroid is no longer a threat.

"There a many people who took observations of Apophis, but there are certain critical times to take the data that make a big difference on how accurately we can predict the orbit," Ryan continued.  "So NM Tech and also the Panstar telescope in Hawaii provided the most critical databases."

But Ryan says their work is never done.  They discover 20 new objects a night.

"And as long as we're not in the same place at the same time, everything great," Ryan said.

NASA says the asteroid won't get closer than 19,400 miles to Earth.

The rock could have done significant damage, but it wouldn't have meant the end of the world.