An armada for asteroid Apophis?
Friday, April 13th 2029 \u2013 mark it in your calendar. That\u2019s the day an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will fly past Earth, closer than some satellites. Don\u2019t worry \u2013 it will miss, but it\u2019ll will pass so close to Earth that it will be visible to the naked eye of 2 billion people, particularly in North Africa and Western Europe.
Roland Pease this week attended the Apophis T-5 Years conference at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, meeting astronomers scrambling to get missions up to the object to learn what kind of threats such asteroids might pose to us in the future and to discuss the science of planetary defence.
NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-APEX, a follow-on to OSIRIS-REx, will study the physical changes due to the gravitational forces from the Earth as it closely passes us by. But will there be an armada of spacecraft sent to monitor Apophis? The European Space Agency hope to gather support for their own mission, RAMSES.
Presenter: Roland Pease\nProducer: Jonathan Blackwell
Image Credit: JPL/Caltech