Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

On March 12th, 1998, the news seemed dire. A Washington Post headline read,

Huge asteroid, due for a close call. Okay, it was supposed to hit in 2028, but that didn't stop people

from worrying and worrying a lot. After all, that was how the dinosaurs died, wasn't it? An asteroid?

Before we go further into this story, though, here's some good news.

We are not going to be hit by an asteroid in 2028. But this is the story of why we thought we

were and what we learned from it. In 1997, Jim Scottie, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, spotted an asteroid.

It was a big one, a mile in diameter. It was called Asteroid 1997 XF11. And from what he could tell,

it was on a possible collision course with Earth.

The International Astronomical Union's Minor Plant Center was alerted.

Other astronomers took up the cause.

And after a month of study, the verdict was in.

Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics delivered the bad news. It was not out of the question that XF11 could hit the Earth

on October 26th, 2028. According to the Post article, the asteroid was quote, virtually certain to come closer to Earth than the distance to the moon.

In case that's not really clear, in space terms, that is really, really, really close.

Astronomers kept on the case, trying to figure out exactly what we could tell about this asteroid.

Eventually, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab found some photos of the asteroid that had been taken a few years earlier.

They did some new calculations and came to a new conclusion.

Quote, zero chance was their estimation of whether the asteroid would hit the Earth.

In fact, the closest it might come would be 600,000 miles.

Crisis averted, panic over it.

And to avoid being surprised again, NASA created what's now the center for near-earth object studies

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