This is gonna be pretty neat when it happens! Only 5 years away.
> 2029's visit will be particularly close, with the asteroid coming within 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) of the Earth's surface, closer to the Earth than some of our satellites. The asteroid should be visible from the Eastern Hemisphere without the aid of a telescope or binoculars, with the European Space Agency dubbing its flyby "one of the rarest space events of our lives".
NASA has an interactive solar system viewer where you can see the orbits of asteroids, comets, and of course planets. I've set the link to 2029 to get you in the ball park. It's a fun tool to play around with that gives a different perspective than a typical planetarium view since you view from different angles than just earth's surface
> 2029's visit will be particularly close, with the asteroid coming within 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) of the Earth's surface
Wow, that is incredibly close. 20,000 miles is about how far you fly round-trip from JFK to Singapore.
> The OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will dip toward the surface of Apophis and fire its engines to kick up loose rocks and dust
Just hearing this scares me (knowing nothing about orbital physics). I am just imagining a couple generations down the line astronomers saying, well, this asteroid used to not be a concern, except one time we went up there and kicked some rocks around, which accidentally set it onto a direct course for Earth in 2150..
Any alteration made by such a tiny spacecraft is so small that it becomes lost in the background noise of other unpredictable factors. An object this size is likely regularly struck by small rocks anyway. And osiris-apex has already altered the orbit slightly simply by approaching, landing or not.
from one of the articles I read on this, the plan is to get within 16 FEET of the rock and fire the thrusters.. Thats some crazy precision for sure, especially considering this was a secondary mission for the spacecraft
> "Further observations ruled out a collision in 2029, as well as in 2036 and 2068, though they will still be close encounters."
Since we know it's going to come back around, couldn't we hit it with a couple of hydrogen bombs on it's way past us to ensure that it's knocked far off course for it's next orbit?
Busting it into a bunch of fragments of unpredictable size and shape seems like a pretty bad idea. If we wanted to change its course parking a spacecraft on it that has the ability to throw asteroid mass off in a known direction seems like a better idea.
Further observations ruled out a collision in 2029, as well as in 2036 and 2068, though they will still be close encounters.
“A 2068 impact is not in the realm of possibility anymore," Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies said of the asteroid, "and our calculations don’t show any impact risk for at least the next 100 years."
No, it means your point is totally useless towards the discussion of this article. If you were really interested, a simple web search would bring up plenty of other sites about this event. For example:
It's called the internet. People attempt to make money with ads. If you don't like ads, you can use any of the various ways of avoiding them. Complaining about it when you perfectly well know about them is just epitome of childish tantrums
Use Firefox on mobile, install uBlock Origin, no ads. For defence in depth install AdAway or a similar DNS-based blocker as well and the likelihood of one of those pernicious pests slipping through the cracks is even lower. There is no reason to be bothered by ads any more.
If you insist on using a Chromium-based browser use Cromite which already contains two ad blockers. They are not as effective as uBlock Origin but they do block most ads.
> 2029's visit will be particularly close, with the asteroid coming within 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) of the Earth's surface, closer to the Earth than some of our satellites. The asteroid should be visible from the Eastern Hemisphere without the aid of a telescope or binoculars, with the European Space Agency dubbing its flyby "one of the rarest space events of our lives".
reply