The earth is set to narrowly avoid an Armageddon scenario in January 2022 (image: Shutterstock)
Or even, from outer space.
And on Tuesday (18 January), another massive space rock 10 times the size of London’s Big Ben and almost three times bigger than the Empire State Building in New York City missed the earth by an astronomical whisker.
If you’ve just watched recently released Netflix film Don’t Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, this news might even have seemed a little too close to home.
(Graphic: Kim Mogg)
So is there any danger this latest big asteroid could wipe out humanity like the comet in Don’t Look Up – and what is being done to stop asteroids from hitting the earth?
Here’s what you need to know.
Will a massive asteroid hit earth in 2022?
The asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) brushed past the earth on 18 January.
But a near-miss in astronomical terms wouldn’t be considered close at all by most people’s standards here on earth.
The space rock passed by at a distance of more than 1.2 million miles – or roughly five times the distance between the earth and the moon.
There are thousands of potentially deadly asteroids Nasa estimates it has not yet spotted (image: Shutterstock)
This is half the distance at which 4660 Nereus passed the earth in December – the last time a massive space rock ‘narrowly’ avoided a collision with our planet.
While that’s probably close enough for your liking, asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) has come much closer to earth in the past.
In 1933, the asteroid shot by at a distance of just 700,000 miles.
How big is the asteroid?
At more than a kilometre in diameter (1,052m) and travelling at almost 44,000 miles per hour, the space rock has the potential to destroy life on earth.
4660 Nereus is set to come within 2.4 million miles of the earth on 11 December (image: Shutterstock)
It is also defined this way because it has and will approach the earth at less than half the distance from the earth to the sun – around 93 million miles.
This means any slight deviation in its orbit could put it on a collision course with us.
As things stand, asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) is not predicted to come as close to the earth again until 18 January 2105.
Other space rocks are set to come even closer in the meantime, but other asteroids or comets could well come out of nowhere – just as the massive one in Don’t Look Up did.
While Nasa says there is no “significant chance” any of the more than 10,000 asteroids over 140m in size it has come across will hit the earth in the next 100 years, it’s estimated these figures account for just half of the potentially deadly objects out there.
In fact, there could be more than 25,000 near-earth objects in space, meaning we have recorded less than half of the killer asteroids out there.
What is Nasa doing to stop asteroids or comets hitting earth?
Work to save humanity from death by asteroid is still very much in its infancy.
And it only launched its first exploratory mission to see how easy it is to knock an asteroid off course in November 2021.
An artist’s impression of the Dart spacecraft (Image: NASA/PA)
The space agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) mission will see a spacecraft smash into a harmless Nasa-tracked asteroid in a bid to alter the space rock’s course.
If it succeeds, humanity might have discovered a way to keep itself safe from a future deadly impact.
But it is currently the only real-world experiment taking place in this field, so if it comes to nothing, we’ll still be just as vulnerable as we currently are.
What is an asteroid?
An asteroid is a rocky fragment left over from the formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago.
Most of them orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
Scientists estimate there are millions of space rocks in this part of space – some of which are hundreds of kilometres in size.
Sometimes, these asteroids change their orbits if they come under the influence of a planet’s gravity.
They can also collide with one another – incidents which can throw out smaller, but still hazardous, shards of rock.
One such stray rock – measuring just 20m in diameter – hit the earth in 2013 with up to 33-times the power of the atomic bomb the US dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two.
This blast took place over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk and blew out windows in more than 3,600 apartment blocks and injured 1,200 people.
A much larger stray asteroid as big as six miles wide is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
The European Space Agency is fast-tracking a new mission called Ramses, which will fly to near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it comes very close to our planet — closer even than the region where geosynchronous satellites sit.
Ramses is short for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as its name suggests, is the next phase in humanity’s efforts to learn more about near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) and how we might deflect them should one ever be discovered on a collision course with planet Earth.
In order to launch in time to rendezvous with Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanctioning and appropriation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at ESA’s Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November of 2025. To arrive at Apophis in February 2029, launch would have to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is a big deal because large asteroids don’t come this close to Earth very often. It is thus scientifically precious that, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass within 19,794 miles (31,860 kilometers) of Earth. For comparison, geosynchronous orbit is 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above Earth’s surface. Such close fly-bys by asteroids hundreds of meters across (Apophis is about 1,230 feet, or 375 meters, across) only occur on average once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. Miss this one, and we’ve got a long time to wait for the next.
When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was for a short time the most dangerous asteroid known, being classified as having the potential to impact with Earth possibly in 2029, 2036, or 2068. Should an asteroid of its size strike Earth, it could gouge out a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, flash heating and earth tremors. If it crashed down in the ocean, it could send a towering tsunami to devastate coastlines in multiple countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit became more refined, however, the risk of impact greatly went down. Radar observations of the asteroid in March of 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from hundreds of kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally removing any lingering worries about an impact — at least for the next 100 years. (Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot with any accuracy, but there’s currently no suggestion that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So, Earth is expected to be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis comes through. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis responds by coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
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“There is still so much we have yet to learn about asteroids but, until now, we have had to travel deep into the solar system to study them and perform experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” said Patrick Michel, who is the Director of Research at CNRS at Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in Nice, France, in a statement. “Nature is bringing one to us and conducting the experiment itself. All we need to do is watch as Apophis is stretched and squeezed by strong tidal forces that may trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material from beneath the surface.”
The Goldstone radar’s imagery of asteroid 99942 Apophis as it made its closest approach to Earth, in March 2021. (Image credit: NASA/JPL–Caltech/NSF/AUI/GBO)
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s close encounter with Earth, and sticking with it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in prime position to conduct before-and-after surveys to see how Apophis reacts to Earth. By looking for disturbances Earth’s gravitational tidal forces trigger on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity and composition, all of which are characteristics that we would need to first understand before considering how best to deflect a similar asteroid were one ever found to be on a collision course with our world.
Besides assisting in protecting Earth, learning about Apophis will give scientists further insights into how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system, and, in the process, how planets (including Earth) formed out of the same material.
One way we already know Earth will affect Apophis is by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is categorized as an Aten-type asteroid, which is what we call the class of near-Earth objects that have a shorter orbit around the sun than Earth does. Apophis currently gets as far as 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million km, or 85.5 million miles) from the sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational nudge that will enlarge its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million km, or 102 million miles), such that its orbital period becomes longer than Earth’s.
It will then be classed as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses won’t be alone in tracking Apophis. NASA has repurposed their OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Bennu, in 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), won’t arrive at the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after the close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will initially perform a flyby of Apophis at a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km) from the object, then return in June that year to settle into orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
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Furthermore, the European Space Agency still plans on launching its Hera spacecraft in October 2024 to follow-up on the DART mission to the double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART impacted the latter in a test of kinetic impactor capabilities for potentially changing a hazardous asteroid’s orbit around our planet. Hera will survey the binary asteroid system and observe the crater made by DART’s sacrifice to gain a better understanding of Dimorphos’ structure and composition post-impact, so that we can place the results in context.
The more near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis that we study, the greater that context becomes. Perhaps, one day, the understanding that we have gained from these missions will indeed save our planet.
