Meteorologist Paul Dorian
*”Just a bit outside”…thankfully…a close call with asteroid Apophis in April 2029 and billions should be able to view it*
Overview
It was quite a scare when first discovered in 2004, but thousands of observations later, we now know that the asteroid known as Apophis will miss Earth when it makes its closest approach in April 2029. However, in the grand scheme of things in our vast universe, this will be a close call, and it’ll come so close that billions of people should be able to see it with their naked eyes. Interestingly, the closest flyby to Earth by Apophis will fall on “Friday the 13th” in April of 2029.
Credit for graphic spaceweather.com
Discussion
The asteroid that is officially known as 99942 Apophis – named after the Egyptian god of chaos and darkness – will safely fly past Earth on Friday, April 13th, 2029, but the earliest calculations gave it a 1-in-37 chance of hitting Earth or a 2.7% probability…the highest impact odds ever given to a sizeable asteroid. Years after the initial discovery in 2004 and thousands of observations later, we now know that Apophis will miss, but by so little that billions of people should be able to see it with their naked eyes according to spaceweather.com. In fact, there are estimates that as many as 7.6 billion people on Earth will be able to see asteroid Apophis with their naked eyes – about 90% of the world’s population – with North America being the only continent that will not get a clear view of Apophis. (Source). During the flyby, Apophis will move around 42 degrees per hour (the width of a full Moon every minute according to spaceweather.com) and will visibly drift against the background stars…a sight no human has ever seen without a telescope. Since 2021, telescopes on Earth have been unable to see Apophis as it has been hiding in the sun’s glare. However, by August of 2027, the asteroid should re-appear to Earth’s telescopes as a faint magnitude 21 speck.
Apophis will slowly move across the night sky through a set of well-known constellations, although its exact position will depend on where in the world you are. (Image credit: eclipseatlas.com)
Apophis is a peanut-shaped ~375-meter near-Earth asteroid and will pass within 20,000 miles of Earth’s surface (Source). While that is much farther away than the International Space Station and the thousands of other spacecraft in low Earth orbit, it is closer than several hundred satellites stationed in an elevated geosynchronous orbit. (Apophis poses no threat to these high-altitude satellites because they can easily be maneuvered away from its projected path.)
Because Apophis is coming so close, it presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scientific study. Earth’s gravity will slightly alter the asteroid’s orbit and potentially cause physical shifts like quakes on the space rock’s surface. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. Several space agencies are preparing missions to intercept and study the asteroid during this rare flyby:
- OSIRIS-APEX (NASA): Originally the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that visited the asteroid Bennu, this probe has been redirected to intercept Apophis and study its surface changes and composition. (Source)
- RAMSES (ESA): The European Space Agency is sending a mission to rendezvous with Apophis as it passes by, deploying smaller companion spacecraft to record how the asteroid reacts to Earth’s gravity. Cruising alongside the asteroid, Ramses will release two CubeSats and one will try to land. (Source)
- Japan’s DESTINY+ spacecraft, developed by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is a deep space technology demonstrator mission that will perform a preliminary flyby of the near-Earth asteroid Apophis. Launching in 2028 aboard Japan’s new H3 rocket, the probe will gather crucial data on cosmic dust and the asteroid’s surface as it continues in route to its primary target, the active asteroid 3200 Phaethon. (Source)
One final note, if such an asteroid were to strike the planet, the consequences would very likely be catastrophic. The energy released would be equivalent to more than 1,000 megatons of TNT, which is significantly more powerful than the 1908 Tunguska event (presumably a meteorite or comet) that devastated a large part of eastern Siberia more than a century ago. An impact would destroy areas for hundreds of kilometers and could trigger massive tsunamis if it hit the ocean. (Source) Not to worry though as NASA has definitively confirmed that Apophis poses zero risk of impacting Earth for at least the next 100 years. (Source)
Meteorologist Paul Dorian
Arcfield
arcfieldweather.com
The Sky is Falling…The Sky is Falling..!
The sky is falling. Every day. Fortunately, most of the time, the size of the pieces of sky that are falling are smaller than grains of sand.
But on occasion, bigger pieces of sky do fall. Now that we know what to look for, hundreds of craters, some hundreds of miles across have been found.
If it turned out that Apophis was going to hit us, we have no technology, ready to go, that could have diverted it.
Finding the dangerous pieces of sky, and developing technologies to nudge them out of the way is vital.
It would be too bad if a piece fell onto Fauci’s house.
We had a solution, but Bruce Willis has since retired.
. . . and we no longer have Space Shuttles, to fly roughneck misfits that have been quickly trained to be astronauts for vacuum operations on the surface of an asteroid (less than 0.05 g surface gravity, close to zero-g, but not portrayed as such), to drill below* the asteroid’s surface to place one or two nuclear weapons there to “blow apart” the Texas-size asteroid.
Yeah, that too.
*Note: In the movie “Armageddon”, the Shuttle team is stated to need to drill 800 feet (about 245 meters), or 0.15 miles deep into the asteroid to place the nuclear bomb there, even though the “size of Texas” would be equivalent to a asteroid of diameter of roughly 1,000 kilometers, 600 miles. Most engineers and geophysicists would conclude such a scenario would just “flake off” a small piece of such a large asteroid and certainly not break it apart. Oh, well.
Where is your sense of humor? C’mon now; lighten up; you’ll have a more harmonious outcome…
Oh, you took my comment above to be a serious one?
I guess next time I’ll have to clarify such with a “/sarc” tag . . . you know, for those that may not have a sense of humor.
Humor is where you find it-or not.
Even breaking it up may reduce the impact some but not much. Really need to change the path.
Breaking it up does change the path for much/most of the asteroid. The question is, is the delta V given to most of the pieces sufficient for them to miss the Earth given the time remaining until impact..
To make the movie even dumber, they were drilling at a 45 degree angle instead of straight down.
Ask Elon Musk to take charge of the response. It will be solved very quickly .
SpaceX/Elon Musk won the initial NASA contract for the Starship Human Landing System (HLS) vehicle on April 16, 2021, with it contracted to fly in 2027 as part of the Artemis 3 mission.
So far, there is no prototype of Starship HLS and even the basic Starship has yet to orbit Earth, let alone be “man-rated”.
At the current rate of progress, SpaceX/Elon Musk will not deliver an HLS vehicle in 2027, and almost certainly one won’t exist by early-2028 for the Artemis IV mission that NASA has shifted to be the first “return to the Moon” lunar landing.
IMHO, a functioning, man-rated Starship HLS delivered to NASA in 2031 is an outside possibility, and that would be a full decade after such was ordered.
The USA went to Moon and back, from nearly a standing start, in less time under JFK’s national commitment to do such in the 1960’s.
NASA’s space launch system (SLS) was well over a decade behind schedule.
NASA cut a lot of corners to make that schedule. It’s a miracle they only lost 3 astronauts over that period.
Gene Kranz would argue differently . . . and rightly so.
And SLS has absolutely no bearing on what happened during the Apollo program . . .
. . . well, perhaps is does show how much more efficiently NASA operated during the 1960’s compared to after that.
If SLS has no bearing on what happened during the 60’s, why do you believe that Musk’s progress does?
Mainly on rooftop solar installations LOL
Neil is still stuck in crayon mode. Or is it finger painting?
Malignant Narcissist Mode
“Missed it by that much”.
Maxwell Smart
“I hope I wasn’t out of line about the ‘peanut’ thing”
Also maybe Maxwell Smart.
I was wondering why we should be scared of a peanut.
No Fireball?
It runs on renewables.
Could have been a lot of Smoke on the Water…
Buy your own bottle.
It is remarkable the measurements are accurate enough to determine it will miss by 20,000 miles this far from the date of arrival .
I hope they are right.
It might be 40,000 miles miss in which case we will struggle to see it, then again…..
For JPL’s highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793 – JPL
That’s 15 decimal places. Their record is pretty good.
I will text Sheldon to verify.
Well, excluding of course, the failed Mars Climate Orbiter mission, where the spacecraft came too close to the planet and burned up in the Martian atmosphere. The root cause was mismatch of units: Lockheed Martin, the contractor that built the spacecraft, provided thruster performance data in English units (pound-seconds) but NASA’s navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory assumed the data was in metric units (Newton-seconds) and the error was not recognized in time for correction.
Their record is pretty good.
Not perfect
One pound-second equals 4.4482 newton-seconds so the error was almost 4.5X too much thrust.
That seems to be Pi in the sky….
What sort of pie ??
Pi to 15 decimal places is not my issue. The bit that concerns me is during the next thirty nine months of space travel, let us hope it does not suffer from micro impacts due to debris hanging about in the solar system. A small change in velocity might alter the 29,000 mile cushion we are grateful to have.
Micro meteorites aren’t big enough to have a measurable impact on speed or direction.
Bruce Willis and his crew of oil well drillers will be on standby, just in case.
Have see several videos discussing Apophis, main thrust being it is believed to not be solid. I’ll go search and drop some links here.
Fascinating stuff, thanks for the link. So, instead of being a solid rock, it is more like a rock pile only bonded together by its own gravity. Look at it wrong and it might start falling to pieces. Not unlike the emotionally unstable Alarmists.
At only 375 meters long, it doesn’t seem like there would be enough gravitational force to keep it together. If it does, would that mean an Aircraft Carrier in space would have enough gravity to keep the planes on the deck?
In a vacuum, the plane’s wings could not possibly provide lift.
Well . . . there is the solar wind . . . hard to find a pure vacuum inside the solar system.
That wasn’t the question.
There’s no counterforce trying to break the asteroid up. It doesn’t need much gravity to hold it together.
The few ounces that an plane would weigh on the asteroid would be enough to keep it on the carrier, at least until a space suited sailor came along and threw it overboard.
Well, if it’s coming “close” to Earth, and the Sun, those would seem to be much larger forces.
All depends on how close and for how long.
Remember, It’s not the totality of the Earth’s gravity that matters. What matters is the difference between the Earth’s gravity between the point that is the furthest from the Earth, versus the point that is the closest the Earth.
Here on the surface, how much does the Earth’s gravity change when we climb 375 meters? A very tiny amount. It can be measured, but only by the most sensitive of instruments. 20,000 kilometers up, the difference in gravity caused by an increase in height of 375 meters is going to be even less.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Here is one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXaAOVqPAaI
Bad link
Ok, don’t know what youtube’s problem is, it won’t let me get to different video links, just keeps going back to first one.
don’t know what youtube’s problem is
Attempted government censorship and content control… in the UK, anyway.
Apparently it was my search for multiple videos, that type of simple operation confuses and scares youtube. Once I erased the search I could copy&paste other links. AI is such an idiot. 😉
Alright, another more general one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3fJ_GjhquY
Poor timing by the Heaven’s Gate cult?
I remember hearing the news helicopters circling over the house where the cult lived and died. I also remember reading mid-1970’s news reports about a couple claiming to be aliens and it turned out the same couple was involved with the cult.
It’s an interesting decade.
Very high solar flare activity causing mayhem on digital equipment
El Niño stuffing a blocking high over Europe
Asteroids zooming by
Tectonic activity all over the ring of fire,and in Italy
It all HAS to be down to CO2, right? 🙂
Who knew CO2 was-is?-such a thug beating up and shaking down the poor old lady Gaia.
Not necessarily.
“I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to the earth.”
— Ray, in the movie “Ghostbusters”
From what I have read, an asteroid impact in the deep oceans would not cause much of a tsunami. Most of the energy from the impact would be absorbed evaporating water. To cause a big tsunami, the asteroid would have to land in relatively shallow water, so that the impact would transfer most of it’s energy into the bed rock, with the massive heaving of the bedrock displacing water, which would in turn cause a tsunami.
Yup.
Use to throw stones in the lake.
0 chance = 2.7% probability? Hmmmm….