WARNING: Space Rock!

[M Holmes]

www.spaceguarduk.com/news.htm

Short form:

An Earthbuster sized rock called "Apophis" (how Stargate is *that*?)
will squeak by the Earth on Friday 13th April 2029 at a distance of
20,000 miles.  It sounds a lot but it's lower than TV sats and in
astronomical terms that's like being missed by a truck that leaves paint
flecks on your nose.  It'll even be naked-eye visible as it passes - an
extremely rare event in itself. 

As it turns out though, we don't get to whistle and return to regular
programming.  Seems that there's a spot about twice the size of Apophis
in the Earth locale, and if Apophis threads the cosmic needle by passing
through it, and gets affected just so by the Earth-Moon gravity then
exactly seven years later, it'll be back to ruin our whole day. 

What's interesting is that we don't know whether it will hit that spot,
and it'd take a great deal more calculation to narrow down where it will
go, though due to sundry small effects, it will be hard to be sure. 
Luckily it'd be a lot easier to make it miss that spot than to make it
miss the Earth - a small "gravity tractor" would suffice.  The trouble
is that unless we get better info on its trajectory, we might as easily
be moving it onto the target as off it. Ironically it'd cost about a
quarter of a billion to get a transponder and gravity tractor out there,
and that's just about what it cost to make the movie "Armageddon".

On the face of it though, we're more likely to make "Armageddon II" than
we are to get some machinery out there to perhaps achieve the real
thing.

FoFP

P.S: If you want the date of the Biblical Flood, the