NASA Sends Spacecraft to Study ‘God of Chaos’ Asteroid Before Close Encounter With Earth in 2029
By Fox News // December 26, 2023
spacecraft named OSIRIS-APEX
(FOX NEWS) – Fresh off its historic mission to collect samples from an asteroid in deep space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has its newest assignment: studying another asteroid during its close encounter with Earth.
OSIRIS-REx ended its seven-year, 4 billion-mile round-trip journey to collect samples from the space rock Bennu in September. But instead of shutting down the craft, the team proposed sending it on a second mission to the asteroid Apophis, expected to pass closer to Earth in 2029 than any other similarly-sized asteroid in recorded history.
They’re renaming the spacecraft OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer).
“The close approach is a great natural experiment,” Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, principal investigator for OSIRIS-APEX, said in a NASA press release last week. “We know that tidal forces and the accumulation of rubble pile material are foundational processes that could play a role in planet formation. They could inform how we got from debris in the early solar system to full-blown planets.”
Asteroids of that size pass Earth this closely only once every 7,500 years, according to scientific estimates. Scientists originally said there was about a 3% chance the asteroid would collide with Earth, but over the years they realized there would be no collision in 2029, nor during Apophis’ return trip in 2036.
The near brush with Earth will alter the asteroid’s orbit and the length of its day — normally 30.6 hours. It could also produce quakes and landslides on Apophis, which could then expose material that lies beneath the asteroid’s surface.
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