![]() “Learning about the composition will help us understand the history of the solar system and where these things came from. “These asteroids are primordial samples,” Chodas said. Shortly after April 13, the craft - by then renamed OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer, or OSIRIS-APEX - will steer toward the asteroid until it is drawn into its orbit, eventually getting close enough to collect a sample from its surface.Īpophis is shaped like a peanut shell, a form astronomers call a “contact binary.” The hunk of nickel, iron and silicate is a relic from the earliest days of the solar system, a byproduct of the massive cloud of gas and dust that formed 4.6 billion years ago and eventually led to us. OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft currently ferrying home samples from the surface of an asteroid called Bennu, will rendezvous with Apophis in 2029. Though it may appear far away for those of us down here, it will in fact be near enough for NASA to reach out and touch it. In this case, it’s nature doing the flyby for us.”įrom the ground, Apophis will resemble a star traversing the night sky, as bright as the constellation Cassiopeia and slower than a satellite. “We usually send spacecraft out there to visit asteroids and find out about them. “It’s something that almost never happens, and yet we get to witness it in our lifetime,” Farnocchia said. According to NASA, this space rock is approaching Earth at a fearsome speed of 38997 kilometers. Within a few years, they were able to dismiss the even smaller chance of a hit in 2036.Īn approach this close from an asteroid this big occurs at most every few thousand years, said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL. This near-Earth asteroid is expected to make its closest approach to Earth tomorrow, September 16. Within a few months, scientists were able to rule out the possibility of a 2029 strike. The longer astronomers track an asteroid, the more clearly defined its orbit becomes. Since the scale’s adopted in 1999, none of the roughly 30,000 near-Earth objects known to exist in the solar system had ranked higher than 1 on the zero-to-10 scale. “That is very serious and, actually, a very unexpected and rare event.”Īstronomers use a color-coded warning system called the Torino scale to gauge the degree of danger an asteroid or comet presents to Earth in the next 100 years. “We were shocked,” said Paul Chodas, who manages NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. In a nod to its horrifying potential, they named it Apophis, after an Egyptian god of chaos. 'n/a' means that a frequency estimate is not available. After calculating its potential orbits, astronomers were startled to realize it had a 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2029. A measure of how infrequent the Earth close approach is for asteroids of the same size and larger: 0 means an average frequency of 100 per year, i.e., roughly every few days or less, 1 corresponds to roughly once a month, 2 to roughly once a year, 3 to roughly once a decade, etc.
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