A new study looking at the potentially hazardous asteroid 99,942 Apophis has suggested that the odds of an impact in 2029 or 2036 is ever so slightly higher than we thought.
When Apophis was first discovered in 2004, observations briefly placed it at level 4 on the Torino impact hazard scale, with a score of 0 meaning the likelihood of impact is zero or thereabouts, and 10 meaning “a collision is certain, capable of causing global climatic catastrophe that may threaten the future of civilization as we know it, whether impacting land or ocean.”
While level 4 might sound low, it is the highest level of any object that has been discovered since NASA first started monitoring potentially hazardous Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).
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