NASA Spacecraft Will Visit Apophis, Once Earth’s Deadliest Asteroid Threat
It all began late one night in June 2004, with a small dot swimming into view through the optics of the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the mountains of Arizona. Astronomer Fabrizio Bernardi and two of his colleagues flagged the dot as a possible newly discovered asteroid and confirmed its space-rock status in short order. Initially designated 2004 MN4, the asteroid was intriguing but unremarkable—an object with a width of a few hundred meters about 14 million kilometers from Earth.
To the world’s relief, further refinements of the orbit of Apophis ruled out the chances of it impacting Earth for the next century. Yet the asteroid will still get extremely close to us in 2029, when it will pass just 32,000 kilometers from our planet, swooping below the orbits of geostationary satellites. “It’s an exceptional encounter,” says Davide Farnocchia of JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Objects of this size only come this close to Earth once “every few thousand years.
OSIRIS-APEX will sidle up to Apophis a couple of months after the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, performing initial reconnaissance before entering orbit around the object in August 2029. Mapping the surface, mission scientists will look for any interesting changes elicited by Apophis’s brief plunge through our planet’s gravitational grip.
OSIRIS-APEX may not be the only mission to visit Apophis, and it is not the only mission with planetary defense in mind. A South Korean team has also proposed a journey to the asteroid, with a spacecraft launching in 2027 and arriving in January 2029, before Apophis’s Earth flyby, to better observe structural changes. And missions with smaller spacecraft, such as Apophis Pathfinder, have been put forward as well.
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