Asteroid Apophis Update: No Impact, but a Call to Action

 (credit: Wikipedia)

Right now, a 70-meter antenna in Southern California, NASA’s Goldstone antenna, is sending radio signals 15 million kilometers into deep space, aimed at a target only about 325 meters across, the asteroid Apophis. Bouncing back to us, these radio signals are providing crucial information about this rude invader of our solar neighborhood.

For years the question has been, where exactly will this asteroid, first discovered in 2004, be in 2029 and in 2036, the years when it will pass so close to the Earth that impacts have been considered a possibility? Apophis’s current flyby in the month of January, 2013 may give us with some answers. The “pinging” of Apophis by NASA’s Goldstone antenna is helping to provide a more accurate understanding of its orbit.

These measurements, along with observations from optical telescopes on the ground, and an infrared telescope in space, have led the manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, Don Yeomans, to downgrade the chance of a 2036 impact to less than one in a million. It now seems that it will just pass extremely close, between the Earth and our geosynchronous satellites, on April 13, 2029. But that 2029 pass will alter the orbit of Apophis, and the concern was that this alternation might set it up for an impact in 2036. The Russian Academy of Sciences has also proposed landing a tracking device on Apophis in 2020, in order to understand its orbit even more precisely as it approaches its 2029 close pass.

This is a very important development, as an impact would release well over 4,000 times more energy than the largest thermonuclear bomb ever detonated, causing immediate devastation on the scale of a small continent or a big country. In fact we have only discovered about 1.5% of the total  estimated total population of near-Earth asteroids, ranging from the large planet killers to the small objects that could eliminate any large city (such as the size of the Tunguska impact in 1908).

Now that the direct threat looks to be minimal (at least for the next few decades), this should stand as a clear warning, and signal an imperative to develop the capabilities to handle these types of threats before they occur. Russian government officials, for example, have made repeated offers for joint cooperation with the United States to tackle this challenge, which Washington has not answered.

In October of 2011, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin (Russia ambassador to NATO at the time) called for such an approach under the name of the “Strategic Defense of Earth”, which would involve joint efforts to ward off dangers not only from ballistic missiles, but also from space, such as comets and asteroids. The Russians posited this as a direct alternative to the U.S./NATO installing missile defense systems at Russia’s boarders.

E.I.R. Strategic Alert
www.eir.de