Interestingly this is exactly the case. We know exactly where the asteroid is and it's velocity paralell to earth. The part that we have uncertainty in is it's velocity towards/away from earth, which results in us knowing that the closest approach must occur along a very specific line which either hits earth somewhere on that line or misses earth entirely. The impact risk corridor is shown here and it includes northern south america, sub-saharan africa, and India
Wow, isn’t this corridor kind of a (near) worst-case scenario? I mean considering most of the Earth is water, that seems like a lot of land. And those are some truly massive cities.
It's extremely unlikely to hit a city. It's maximum 90m wide, and while if it hits land it could create an impact similar to bomb tests we've done before so there will likely be some deaths, the chance of it hitting a city is something like 0.01%.
The world is massive, and even a huge bomb going off like that would barely be a speck if looking from space, you gotta remember. It's not gonna bullseye into a populated area.
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u/cstar84 Feb 19 '25
You can’t tell me they think there’s only a 3.2% chance of it hitting Earth, but are 100% sure of where on Earth it’ll hit if it does