A tale of two asteroids

PhysOrg.com reports that a 500-meter asteroid dubbed 2004 VD17 has a 1 in 1,000 chance of hitting Earth in less than century - the highest of any known asteroid. Were it to hit us (on May 4, 2102, to be precise) it'd deliver 10,000 megatons of energy, roughly equivalent to all the nuclear weapons on Earth going off at the same time, in the same place. Needless to say that would be Very Bad. (BTW, the previous leading deliverer of doom, Apophis, has only a tenth the mass and a 1 in 5,000 chance of hitting us on April 13, 2029.)

But not all asteroids are hurtling harbingers of global destruction - oh, no! Take the 2 km 3554 Amun, for instance, which Business 2.0 reports (in an interesting article about the burgeoning business of space) contains $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinum-like metals. It next crosses Earth's orbit in 2020, when it'll be easier to reach than the Moon - providing an enterprising entrepeneur an opportunity at wealth 450 times that of Bill Gates.