At the time of the announcement in January, the asteroid’s impact probability was reported to exceed 1%. The impact probability describes how likely a hazardous asteroid is to hit Earth.

“Most math teachers live at the ‘analyze’ phase of that,” Maddox said. “They want to just do probability outside of a context: find the mean, find the standard deviation, find the math ...

The impact probability describes how likely a hazardous asteroid is to hit Earth. For example, if the impact probability is 1%, it means that in 1 of 100 cases, it hits Earth.