Latest news with #99942Apophis
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
European Space Agency working on spacecraft to steer asteroids away from Earth
Hollywood films would have you believe that the best way to deal with an Earth-threatening asteroid is to blast it out of orbit. But the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking at a far subtler approach to saving the planet - a gravity tractor. The plan involves sending a spacecraft to rendezvous with a dangerous asteroid and use its tiny gravitational field to slightly alter the space rock's trajectory so that, over time, it would soar harmlessly past Earth. It is an idea that has been floating around for several decades, but has only recently become more pressing following the 2024 YR4 scare earlier this year - an asteroid that came seemingly out of nowhere and at one point had a one in 32 chance of hitting Earth in December 2032. Joseph Aschbacher, the Director General of ESA, admitted he had been ''very worried' about 2024 YR4 and said the space agency was stepping up its planetary defence capabilities. Speaking to The Telegraph at Space-Comm expo this week, Dr Aschbacher said: 'I was very worried. 'If the asteroid is in front of your door, more or less, it's too late, and we probably cannot do much. 'The earlier you detect an asteroid that might impact planet Earth, and the earlier you can take action far away from planet Earth, the higher the chances are that it will not have negative impacts. '(A planetary defence mission) may actually start, by just sending a satellite there, and letting it fly close by the asteroid so that the gravity of the satellite influences the gravity of the asteroid itself. 'Slightly by degrees, it would change the trajectory, and therefore may result in a different trajectory than the ones that might be directed to Earth. So the further away you can do it, the bigger the chances of minimising damage.' Last year, ESA announced that it planned to rendezvous with the asteroid 99942 Apophis, a cruise ship-sized rock, which makes an exceptionally close flyby of Earth in April 2029, when it will be visible to the naked eye. The mission, called Ramses (Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety), will give a crucial window into how asteroids are impacted by gravitational forces - in this case, the gravity of Earth. Apophis was predicted to get dangerously close to Earth in 2068, but experts have since revised their calculations and no longer see it as a risk. 'We have a mission planned already to encounter that asteroid before it comes to Earth, and to really measure it,' added Dr Aschbacher. 'We are not assuming it will hit planet Earth, but it will fly by very closely, and that will be quite a spectacle, in terms of every citizen being able to see it, but it is a unique opportunity to really study the asteroid close by.' Most asteroids and comets have orbits that do not bring them very close to Earth, and they are only classed as dangerous if they come within 4.6 million miles and are larger than 460 feet. But occasionally they can hit. The last major impacts include the Tunguska event in 1908 in Siberia which felled an estimated 80 million trees, while the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor is the only known incident in modern times which resulted in numerous injuries. Only one asteroid deflection test has ever taken place in space. In 2022, Nasa sent its Dart (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft to crash into Dimorphos – a 525ft-wide 'moonlet' which circles a larger asteroid called Didymos. The team had hoped the impact would shorten Didymos' 11 hour 11 minute orbit by a few minutes, but it ended up shaving off around half an hour. However, the impact had unexpected consequences, unleashing a storm of boulders 'as deadly as Hiroshima' and proving that deflection strategies could have unintended consequences that leave smaller rocks on a collision course with Earth. In contrast, a gravity tractor would cause less collateral damage, gently nudging an Earth-bound asteroid in a new trajectory. Last year, ESA launched a spacecraft, named Hera, which is travelling to Didymos-Dimorphos to assess the true scale of the damage in a mission which will help determine which asteroid defence scheme will be chosen in the event of another scare. It is due to arrive in October next year. Dr Paul Bate, the chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: 'Asteroids are one of the ways in which you show the power in space, so we are right to be worried. 'Whether we like it or not, these things have been happening literally since the start of the solar system. We're connected. 'We don't have any choice, but we know we can actively choose to understand more and that's very important for deflection, for protecting our planet.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips review
At 9.45pm on 13 April 2029, you might want to take a look out of the window. That rock in the sky heading your way fast is actually an asteroid called 99942 Apophis, named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos. Roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, when Apophis hits it'll do to our species what another asteroid did to the dinosaurs 66m years ago. Did I say 'when'? I obviously meant 'if'. After all, as Tom Phillips puts it, space is big, and little Earth easily missable – despite the nominative determinism of what he nicknames Smashy McDeathrock. Plus, in 2022 Nasa deliberately crashed the Dart spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, knocking if off course. If Smashy hits London, hypothesises Phillips, it'll engulf everywhere from Camden to Clapham in a fireball and leave a crater three miles wide that 'would have previously contained approximately 150 branches of Pret'. Truly, any survivors will envy the dead. The serious purpose of Phillips's jolly doomscroll through the apocalyptic sex cults, pandemics, nuclear armageddons, rapture-fetishising fruitloops, numerologically obsessed nincompoops, swivel-eyed preppers waiting out zombie apocalypses in their Utah silos, not to mention the Bible's (spoiler alert!) troubling last act, is to work out quite why, after so many failed prophesies, doom-mongery still thrives. Have we learned nothing from the fate of Dutch baker Jan Matthys, who in 1533 predicted Jesus's second coming and that the last day was imminent? Clearly not. For a while, Matthys headed what proper historians don't call a funtime Anabaptist proto-communist sex cult in otherwise sleepy Münster. The local prince-bishop's soldiers put an end to that nonsense, hacking Matthys to pieces and nailing his genitals to the city gates, as a warning that one should, in Phillips's words, 'not even slightly consider fucking with the prince-bishop of Münster'. Though Matthys's world ended that day, humanity did not. Some 490-odd years later we're still around – as is a secular mutation of conspiracist apocalyptic thinking, most tellingly among Trump-loyalist tech bros. PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for instance, recently argued in the FT that Trump's second term heralds apocalypse, but in a good way. Apokálypsis, the Greek for unveiling, Thiel wrote, will adjudicate 'the sins of those who govern us today'. Thanks to Trump and the internet, politically inconvenient information allegedly redacted by what Thiel calls the 'Distributed Idea Suppression Complex' (ie legacy media, Democrats and others in the woke blob) will become available, enabling us to learn that Covid was a bioweapon and who killed JFK. Thiel didn't consider a more inconvenient truth, namely that the internet doesn't so much tell truth to power as dupe cognitively depleted QAnon rubes with paranoid guff. That would explain what happened on Tuesday 2 November 2021. Demolition contractor turned online influencer Michael Protzman predicted that on that day, John F Kennedy Jr would appear in Dallas to announce that he had not died in a plane crash in 1999. Several hundred followers gathered on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza where his father was assassinated nearly 60 years earlier. 'Quite why they expected JFK Jr to reveal himself in Dallas when he'd died off the coast of Massachusetts is a little unclear,' Phillips writes, though he notes that some believed he would go ''And here's my dad, who's also alive', as a surprise finale.' Neither turned up. Undaunted, like so many of the failed prophets with whose stories Phillips entertains us, Protzman led followers to a Rolling Stones gig where 'he assured them that Keith Richards would remove his face revealing that he had actually been JFK Jr for an unspecified time'. Fans of Phillips's earlier books Humans: A Brief History of How we F*cked It All Up and Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t will be pleased that the ex-BuzzFeed editor is on form, not letting the grimness of his subject spoil his gagsmithery. There's a lengthy set up, for instance, for a joke about the 15th-century BC Battle of Megiddo, the city lent its name to Armageddon. The passage seems to make the editorial cut chiefly so Phillips can tell us that the Pharaoh Thutmose III tried his – wait for it – thutmost in that battle. Only one criticism – the title. Phillips has more asterisks than asteroids. Say what you want about the Is It Just Me Or is Everything Shit franchise, at least it had the courage of its cussing. His book is topically valuable corrective for those who think – what with Gaza, Ukraine, floods, firestorms and fools with their fingers on world-ending buttons – we are indeed in the end times and should descend into our silos or colonise Mars. We are not the first to suppose the end is nigh, counsels Phillips. Nor will we be the last. For its most fervent believers, Phillips concludes, apocalypse is 'not simply a terrifying event to be feared, but an ultimate triumph to be longed for and worked towards. At the end of days, Good would finally triumph over Evil, all the woes of the material world would be swept away, and the true believers would be rewarded with the paradise of a new world.' How much harder to refuse such narrative closure, to live – and die – in a world that can't be redeemed nor utterly expunged of human wickedness. A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World by Tom Phillips is published by Wildfire (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
