Earth is safe from infamous asteroid Apophis for the next 100 years, NASA says

Asteroid Apophis – one of the scariest rocks in the solar system – will not pose a threat to Earth for at least another century, according to updated calculations from NASA.

Every 80,000 years or so, an object approximately three football pitches in length crashes into Earth, releasing the equivalent of over 1,000 megatons of TNT. Apophis’ discovery in 2004 fitted the description of one of those events that happened once every 80,000 years, naturally frightening many people. A hit from Apophis wouldn’t be bad for Chicxulub – the 10-mile-wide asteroid that wiped out most of life on the planet 66 million years ago – but it would inflict catastrophic levels of local damage and would trigger a worldwide impact in winter.

In 2004, astronomers detected asteroid 99942 Apophis, a near-Earth object approximately 340 meters long. Its status as a potentially dangerous object has been continuously refined over the years, but 2068 continued to represent a particularly worrying year for the asteroid to hit us.

We can now breathe a sigh of relief, as the latest calculations suggest the asteroid will not pose a threat to Earth at this time, according to NASA. declaration. A recent flyby of Apophis, in which the asteroid was less than 44 times the distance from Earth to the Moon, allowed NASA to refine its measurements, which resulted in the new assessment.

“A 2068 impact is no longer in the realm of possibilities, and our calculations show no risk of impact for at least the next 100 years,” said Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies in the announcement from the space agency.

As a result, NASA has now removed Apophis from its wicked list, otherwise known as Sentinel impact risk table. This table, maintained by CNEOS, had ranked Apophis as the third most dangerous known object, rating a probability of impact at around 1 in 150,000. The odds were slim but undeniably not zero. The new calculations allowed CNEOS to remove Apophis from the risk table absolutely.

“With the support of recent optical observations and additional radar observations, the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit collapsed from hundreds of kilometers to just a handful of kilometers when projected to 2029” , said Farnocchia. “This greatly improved knowledge of his position in 2029 offers more certainty about his future motion, so we can now remove Apophis from the risk list.”

The year 2029 is remarkable because it is the next time Apophis will fly over the Earth, during which time he will seriously invade our personal space. This will come within 20,000 miles (32,000 km) of our planet, or one tenth the distance of From the Earth to the Moon and within the reach of certain satellites. Apophis will be so close that it will be visible to small telescopes and binoculars.

When Apophis flew over Earth at the beginning of March of this year, it was right 17 million km away. NASA took the opportunity to study and refine the asteroid’s position, which the space agency did using the radio antenna of Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Deep Space Network communications complex in California. This instrument allowed the team to calculate the position of Apophis with an accuracy of about 150 meters.

Marina Brozovic, the JPL scientist who led the radar campaign, said that if “we had binoculars as powerful as this radar, we could sit in Los Angeles and read a dinner menu at a restaurant in New York,” as she explained in the statement.

Using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the team was able to double the strength of the incoming radio signal, resulting in an imaging resolution of 38.75 meters (127 feet). per pixel.

Data analysis is still incomplete and the team hopes to better characterize the form of Apophis (it is suspected to have a bilobed appearance, in which two asteroids merged to create a peanut-like shape), as well as improved estimates of its spin speed and spin state along its axis. These numbers will help predict the behavior of the object for the 2029 flyby, which scientists say is a once every thousand years possibility of studying an object of this size in such proximity.

With Apophis officially started from the Sentry Impact Risk Chart, the top risk-rated executives are the 0.8 mile wide (1.3-km) asteroid 29075 (1950 DA), which has a 1 in 8,300 chance of hitting Earth in 2880; the 1608 feet wide (490-m) asteroid 101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36), which has a 1 in 2,700 chance of impact from 2175 to 2199; and the 121 feet wide (37-meters) asteroid 2009 JF1, who has a 1 in 3800 chance of hitting Earth next year (May 6, to be exact, so mark your calendars).

These rankings are based on the Palermo Technical Impact Scale, which takes into account other variables apart from the probability of impact, such as the potential of an object to inflictdamage caused by scales.