On that date, the asteroid is expected to pass within 32, km of the Earth's surface. That is about one-tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. During that close approach, Apophis will be visible to observers on the ground in the Eastern Hemisphere of Earth, which includes Asia, Africa and parts of Europe. No telescope or binoculars will be required, unlike for Nasa's 5 March observation. Still, even on that occasion, the radar images of the asteroid had "remarkable resolution", the agency said.
Nasa keeps track of asteroids that could one day make threatening close approaches to Earth, designating them as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids PHA. They all have codenames befitting robots from the Star Wars film series.
Here are three. Antarctic meteorites yield global bombardment rate. A mile-wide asteroid is about to fly past Earth.
Earth's oldest asteroid crater found in Australia. Image source, NASA. Nasa said the Apophis asteroid no longer poses a threat to Earth within the next century. Its full name is Apophis After Apophis was discovered in , the asteroid was given a 2. It also for a time had a small chance of hitting Earth in Additional observations have shown it will not hit Earth in or in Nevertheless, in Apophis will come closer to Earth than our geostationary communications satellites, likely sparking a great deal of public interest.
The Planetary Society has submitted recommendations to the U. We also present these recommendations at workshops and conferences. Apophis is pronounced uh-pah-fis, generally with an emphasis on the second syllable. Click here to listen to a recording. In Egyptian mythology , Apophis was a serpent and the enemy of Ra, the sun god. Every night Apophis sought to bring eternal darkness on the world before being defeated by Ra at sunrise.
Tucker was a grant recipient from our Shoemaker Near Earth Object Grant Program , which funds advanced amateur astronomers who find, track and characterize near-Earth objects. As for the size and mass of Apophis, there's no real ambiguity about it.
The object is estimated to be about feet across a hair smaller than the Eiffel Tower and has a mass of 2. If those figures are meaningless to you, here's a real-world example of what it all means: The asteroid that created Arizona's Meteor Crater seen above is believed to have exploded with the force between three and 10 megatons of energy.
Should Apophis strike, it would likely deliver the equivalent of megatons of energy. By comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima only released about 0. Now that we know the damage that Apophis is capable of delivering, it's time to look into some real-world examples of what would happen when it hits. And it goes without saying that where it hits is going to play a role in how much damage it does. According to Universe Today , wherever the asteroid hits assuming it hits land , it's going to flatten thousands of square miles of land.
If it hits a major city, like London, it's going to level the area, killing millions of people in the process. If you think all of that sounds a bit hyperbolic, consider what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both cases, a nuclear bomb delivering a fraction of the energy Apophis would likely release exploded over the cities, and about , people died as a result according to Newsweek.
Apophis would deliver significantly more magnitude of energy than either of the Hiroshima or Nagasaki weapons. Fortunately, the odds of it hitting a populated area are small. So statistically speaking, it's most likely that Apophis would land in the ocean.
If you've ever thrown a rock into a placid lake, you've undoubtedly seen little ripples extending out in all directions. This displacement of water and the subsequent wave patterns it produces are all real-world examples of fundamental principles of physics that you can see every day.
Now imagine a giant rock Apophis hitting a giant lake the ocean.
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