The World Will Soon Witness "One of the Rarest Space Events of Our Lives" | Hacker News Reader

The World Will Soon Witness "One of the Rarest Space Events of Our Lives"

iflscience.com

55 pointsrbanffy26 comments

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".

One of the most exciting and significant space events of our time.

https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/orrery/#/99942_apophis?time=2029-...

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..

I think the gravitational pull from earth is many orders of magnitude greater deviation there in a chaotic way than anything our engines would do.

Benevolent future AIs sent the rock, to deviate our orbit 1.2% further from the sun, to help with global warming.

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

I thought this was going to be about T Coronae Borealis[0] in September 2024 or weeks[1] by some accounts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_Coronae_Borealis

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVYpfAgup0Q

> "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?

That was the point of NASA's DART mission to see if providing a slight "nudge" could alter the orbit rather than trying to blow it up.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dart

Maybe, but there is much debate about whether bombs would do anything to predictably alter the orbit. We might just make it worse.

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.

Turning it into thousands of still very big fragments traveling in roughly the same orbit is a fantastically bad idea!

https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/Apophis

https://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-list

I follow https://social.tomtaylor.co.uk/@lowflyingrocks

Most of them are pretty far away but there are a few each month within lunar orbit, about 400,000 km

(13 April 2029)

What is it? Advertising?

It’s a visit from asteroid 99942 Apophis.

This is notable because this asteroid may have a small but nonzero chance of striking the earth.

Non zero eventually, for now:

    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."

It’s really confusing that they open by mentioning a supernova.

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