OSIRIS-REx is an 'Asteroid Sample Return Mission' NASA's New Frontiers Program. Laboratories and observatories across the world are working on the tracking effort and drill.OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security‒Regolith Explorer) Spacecraft Launch Mission Status Sensor Complement TAG Phase Flight Dynamics References “This time we are adding in another layer of effort, using this asteroid flyby to test the worldwide asteroid detection and tracking network, assessing our capability to work together in response to finding a potential real asteroid threat.” “Scientists have always appreciated knowing when an asteroid will make a close approach to and safely pass the Earth because they can make preparations to collect data to characterize and learn as much as possible about it,” program scientist Michael Kelley said in a statement from NASA last month. The range is so large because scientists don’t know very much about the asteroid they will also use its flyby to gather more information about it. It will come between 4,200 and 170,000 miles of Earth, both distances that are closer than the moon. It’s a small rock, between 30 and 100 feet across, that is projected to pass by the planet without incident, and the experts are using its pass as a drill of sorts. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and other groups will test their incoming asteroid response in October when the asteroid 2012 TC4 comes close to Earth. Photo: NASA/ESA/Herschel/PACS/MACH-11/MPE/ESAC The European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory captured this image of the asteroid Apophis in 2013. The third option is a last resort, to be used if there isn’t enough time for anything else. Prevention measures include launching spacecraft that would throw the asteroid into a new orbit and off its collision course, either through gravitational pull, a planned crash into the asteroid or, in an Armageddon-type method, planting and donating a device on the rock. If an asteroid were to pose a threat to Earth, there are protocols in place for responding to it and preventing a catastrophe, including communicating with one another and with governments. “In all likelihood further tracking measurements will eliminate even that possibility (one in 100,000).” “Apophis is certainly a hazardous asteroid, and for that reason it has been tracked extensively, and so we know its orbit very accurately,” Chodas told. To be further secure in Earth’s safety, astronomers will continue monitoring Apophis, as they do with other near-Earth objects like asteroids.

It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence when NASA explains how the asteroid got its name: “Also known as Apep, the Destroyer, Apophis is the Egyptian god of evil and destruction who dwelled in eternal darkness.” But reported the newly calculated impact odds were even lower than expected. The asteroid Apophis was discovered in 2004 and will pass very close to Earth in a few years. “We cannot yet exclude the possibility that it could impact our planet,” Paul Chodas from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies told, but he noted that the odds he calculated for the asteroid hitting our planet over the next 100 years - one in 100,000 - are “extremely small.” It will appear again in 2036 but will be several million miles away.Īlthough scientists have ruled out collisions in the next two flybys, the future beyond that was unclear.

It is scheduled to pass by in 2029, when it might get closer than 20,000 miles to Earth - closer than some satellites. Some scientists have been studying Apophis, a 1,000-foot asteroid discovered in 2004, because of how close the space rock will be getting to our planet. Here Are The Odds An Asteroid Will Hit EarthĪn enormous asteroid has only a one in 100,000 chance of striking Earth in this century, a NASA scientist has said.

Finetune odds asteroid hitting