The Asteroid Apophis - Missed It... By THAT! Much

In 2029, like a stone skipping across a cool lake, an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building will gleam past the Earth. April 13, 2029. Friday the 13th. Be prepared. Get toilet paper. Eight years is nothing. I've had some mustard longer than that. How close will it get? A mere 18,600 miles. That's it. That's closer than some satellites. By comparison, the Moon is a whopping 238,900 miles away. This will be the closest asteroid of its size in recorded history and will be visible to the naked eye.

Its name is Apophis, after an ancient Egyptian deity. Depicted as a serpent, Apophis was chaos, the opponent of light and order in the cosmos. Feel free to use that the next time you're stumped for conversation at Applebee's while waiting on your Chocolate Lava Cake.

Hey, here's a thought. What if Apophis plowed into Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney World Orlando? And is Apophis a planet killer?

Well no, it's not. But it would create a huge explosion and blast wave that would incinerate everything in its path for several miles. And think of the debris. It would create shrapnel bigger than hovercrafts. What goes up must come down. The energy would be equivalent to 1200 megatons of TNT. Tsar Bomba, the biggest hydrogen bomb ever tested, was around 50 megatons.

But Apophis is not as big as the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs. That asteroid was about 6 miles in diameter. It struck the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico 66 million years ago. The kinetic energy created from the blast was around 100 million megatons and chipped a 93-mile-wide divot called the Chicxulub crater. And the Earth's largest impact crater is the Vredefort Dome in South Africa. Two billion years ago, an asteroid 9 miles in diameter formed a crater 190 miles wide. That's big. That's like, as big as freakin' Albuquerque. Or an IKEA.

The dimensions of impact craters depend on the asteroid size, density, speed and entry angle. Imperial College in London offers a tool online to estimate crater size. Apophis would make an impact crater 1 to 3 miles wide. Shit, I don't know. I can hardly enter my grocery order on the Walmart website, let alone correctly enter the parameters to estimate the regional environmental consequences of an NEA impact on Earth using some Imperial College Department of Physics doomawitchie. But I tried goddammit.

So back to that question... what if Apophis hit Cinderella's Castle?

Well, the Magic Kingdom is 107 acres. So let me see here... density... kinetic energy... carry the 4... round down to the nearest whole number... hmmm... uhhh... ewww... Well as far as I can figure, let's just say you'd never have to endure It's a Small World ever again. And you should just forget about your Park Hopper Pass too.