Well, apparently the world is going to end sometime within the next 15 years or so -- I've decided to defer my student loans until that time.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Maybe, just maybe, a large and newly sighted asteroid could hit the Earth -- but probably not, astronomers said Wednesday.

They have issued an all-points bulletin on the asteroid that at first looked like it could be on a collision course with Earth, but it will take several more weeks of observation to tell for sure.  [mmmmreally.  swell]

They are calling on astronomers around the world, amateur and professional, to take a look at the mile-wide hunk of rock, so its trajectory can be calculated. [then,... you know...smoke 'em if you got 'em]

In the meantime, they say the odds of it actually hitting are one in 6 million.

"I wouldn't be sweating it," Tim Spahr, astronomer at the Minor Planets Center of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said as he ran to his SUV with a bag of ice a several bottles of vodka in his hands. "Go win the lottery first.  I'm going home now...I'm thirsty."

Scientist say a collision with a large asteroid half a mile in diameter could kill a quarter of the world's population. [Dang.  that would suck...]  Statistically, every 100 million years a 6-mile-wide object hits the Earth in an impact like one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. [So stand DOWN folks...nothing to see here]

The new asteroid, called 2002 NT7, nicknamed 'holyfreakincrap!' was spotted earlier this month. Now 66 million miles away, it orbits the Sun every 2.3 years at a steep angle to Earth's orbit.  

THIS ONE IS BIG

"This one just popped up because it is a big object," Spahr said fumbling for his car keys. "It is two kilometers in size so if it hit it would be really bad. [Duhhhh] We have a scale called the Palermo scale that takes into account size and possible impact velocity and comes up with a rating for an object....this one is an "owie."

2002 NT7 aka 'holyfreakincrap!' is the first "positive" object on the scale system, meant to predict how much damage an asteroid would do if it just happened to hit.

"It just means you better go look at it some more," Spahr said. Don Yeomans of NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pointed out that the Palermo scale system is only a year old so it is not terribly significant that this is the first positive. [neither was the Mars lander nor the Hubble...'oop, we heh heh -- forgot to put the lens in...sorry 'bout that and we finally figured out the difference between feet and meters so nobody panic.  Our bad.']

Because it takes a while to get enough data on any object to determine the risk, astronomers send out a public plea to get as many telescopes looking at it as possible. It is hard to pin down such a tiny object in the vastness of space [except when it's a mile long and oddly looks like the Big Boy that Dr. Evil flies around in -- only a MILE long.]

Although plotting a trajectory of an object on Earth is fairly simple, when something is this far away and this small, things get complicated. [reeeeeally?  honest and for true?]

As it passes by planets such as Mars and Jupiter, it will get pulled by their gravitational fields, for instance.  While passing Mars, it might feel a little frisky and whilst passing Jupiter it might have the urge to invest in the stock market.  We just don't know.

So when calculating all the different places this asteroid could possibly end up, one scenario includes a collision with Earth in 2019 -- yep --it's that Big Blue round thing right in it's path.... eek

Yeomans doubts this will actually happen and he believes the coming weeks will provide data to confirm this [confirm what?  oh, sorry, I got it,...our eventual horrible fiery DEATH!].

"We still have to redouble our efforts to locate these objects in the first place. This program has only been in place a decade. Before that we were blissfully unaware."

It's a bird...no, it's a plane...no it's... Holyfreakin'crap!