Asteroid Impact March 2016?

An asteroid was discovered in 2013 – TX68 – which just might hit Earth in March 2016.

Some sources pinpoint an impact in the Atlantic Ocean; some cite Russian information…

What are the facts?

According to the video below (enter the search words from the screenshot image if the embedded video doesn’t work) asteroid TX68 will be approximately 55 meters wide, which would weigh an estimated 200,000 tons compared to smaller meteors discussed in the video.  If it does hit the Earth, it would probably be traveling at least 14,000 miles per hour.  That won’t be an ELE (Extinction Level Event) but it would make quite a tsunami splash if it did hit the Atlantic.  But can we accurately predict its path that well in advance?

The video shows current models predicting its most likely course will have it pass by our planet at a distance of just over 0.00016AU or 0.06LD.  AU = Astronomical Unit = the distance from Earth to the Sun.  So the estimated closest distance is just one six-thousandth the distance to the sun.  LD = Lunar Distance = distance to the Moon, so about one seventeeth of the distance to the moon.  Now based on those numbers, I calculate that means it would pass about 15,000 miles from the Earth – closer than many of our satellites orbiting around 22,000 miles high – and more importantly, close enough to be well within the margin of error for impact at this early stage in guesstimating the path of the asteroid.  Because a lot depends on EXACTLY how tight the orbit gets on the closest approach to the sun and that depends on outgassing near perihelion, which is still ahead of us.  Any frozen pockets of gases within the asteroid, which get heated near the sun and explode out, could veer the asteroid to one side and lead to significant course corrections – putting Earth well within the range of its possible paths.

But my math, which yields results that are alarming enough, may be incorrect.  The guy who made the video did his own calculations and clearly says in the video that the estimated path of the asteroid is less than 4,000 miles away.  (3982 miles)  If he is right, hopefully that number is the closest it gets to any point on the surface of the Earth, and not to a specific point (like a specific NASA facility) because that pretty much means it could hit somewhere else on the side of the Earth because our planet is almost 8,000 miles across.  This is like saying a bullet will miss someone’s head by a foot – that could mean it hits them in the chest.