OK, Wipe Your Brow, Everyone

Just in case anyone was losing sleep over it, it turns out that the asteroid that had our number on it in 2019 is going to miss, at least that time around. This isn’t surprising–the initial estimates were based on very crude data. Now that more observations have been made, they can get much greater precision in their predictions of the object’s trajectory.

And for those who are interested in how the odds are calculated in general, here’s a little piece in Salon on that subject (thanks to reader Lloyd Albano).