Asteroid’s odds of hitting Mars drop to 3.6%

PASADENA, Calif. — The odds of a collision between asteroid 2007 WD5 and Mars later this month have gone down, scientists said Wednesday.

The chances of a collision on Jan. 30 are currently about 3.6 percent, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In late December, Yeomans said, the odds of a collision between the Red Planet and the 160-foot-wide space rock rose as high as 3.9 percent. Those were the best odds ever recorded by the Near-Earth Objects office, which was set up to track objects that might threaten Earth.

Even though a collision remains a possibility, the object’s most likely course would cause it to miss the planet by 22,000 miles. That’s about one-tenth as far as the moon is from Earth.

An asteroid about the same size flattened forests in Siberia in 1908.