The European Space Agency is speeding up the launch of a new mission called Ramses, which will head to a near-Earth asteroid. 99942 Apophis and join the space rock in 2029 when it will be very close to our planet — even closer than the region where geosynchronous satellites are located.
Ramses stands for Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety and, as the name suggests, is the next phase of humanity’s efforts to learn more about Near Earth Asteroids (NEOs) and how we could deviate if one of them were ever discovered on a collision course with the planet Earth.
In order to be able to launch in time to reach Apophis in February 2029, scientists at the European Space Agency have been given permission to start planning for Ramses even before the multinational space agency officially adopts the mission. The sanction and allocation of funding for the Ramses mission will hopefully take place at the ESA Ministerial Council meeting (involving representatives from each of ESA’s member states) in November 2025. To reach Apophis in February 2029, the launch is expected to take place in April 2028, the agency says.
This is an important matter because large asteroids Asteroids do not come close to Earth that often. It is therefore scientifically valuable that Apophis will pass 31,860 kilometers from Earth on April 13, 2029. For comparison, the geosynchronous orbit is 35,786 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. Such close flybys by asteroids several hundred meters in diameter (Apophis is about 375 meters in diameter) occur on average only once every 5,000 to 10,000 years. If you miss this one, we will have to wait a long time for the next one.
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When Apophis was discovered in 2004, it was briefly the most dangerous asteroid known, with a potential collision date of 2029, 2036, or 2068. If an asteroid of its size were to hit Earth, it could dig a crater several kilometers across and devastate a country with shock waves, sudden heating, and earthquakes. If it crashed into the ocean, it could cause a massive tsunami that would devastate the coastlines of several countries.
Over time, as our knowledge of Apophis’ orbit has become more refined, the risk of impact has diminished considerably. Radar observations The asteroid impact in March 2021 reduced the uncertainty in Apophis’ orbit from several hundred kilometers to just a few kilometers, finally eliminating any lingering concerns about an impact. at least for the next 100 years(Beyond 100 years, asteroid orbits can become too unpredictable to plot accurately, but there is currently no evidence that an impact will occur after 100 years.) So Earth should be perfectly safe in 2029 when Apophis passes. Still, scientists want to see how Apophis will react to coming so close to Earth and entering our planet’s gravitational field.
“We still have a lot to learn about asteroids, but so far we have had to travel to the deepest reaches of the universe. solar system “We need to study them and conduct experiments ourselves to interact with their surface,” Patrick Michel, a CNRS research director at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, said in a statement. “Nature provides one and conducts the experiment itself. All we need to do is observe Apophis stretching and compressing under strong tidal forces that can trigger landslides and other disturbances and reveal new material beneath the surface.”
By arriving at Apophis before the asteroid’s encounter with Earth and remaining alongside it throughout the flyby and beyond, Ramses will be in an ideal position to conduct before-and-after studies to see how Apophis responds to Earth. By looking for disturbances caused by Earth’s tidal gravitational forces on the asteroid’s surface, Ramses will be able to learn more about Apophis’ internal structure, density, porosity, and composition—features we should first understand before thinking about how best to deflect a similar asteroid if one were ever on a collision course with our world.
In addition to helping protect Earth, studying Apophis will help scientists better understand how similar asteroids formed in the early solar system and, in doing so, how planets (including Earth) formed from the same material.
We already know that Earth will affect Apophis by changing its orbit. Currently, Apophis is classified 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. Apophis currently reaches a distance of 0.92 astronomical units (137.6 million kilometers) from the Sun. However, our planet will give Apophis a gravitational boost that will expand its orbit to 1.1 astronomical units (164.6 million kilometers), so that its orbital period will become longer than that of Earth.
It will then be classified as an Apollo-type asteroid.
Ramses will not be alone in hunting down Apophis. NASA has reoriented its OSIRIS-REx Missionwhich returned a sample from another near-Earth asteroid, 101955 Determinationin 2023. However, the spacecraft, renamed OSIRIS-APEX (Apophis Explorer), will not arrive near the asteroid until April 23, 2029, ten days after its close encounter with Earth. OSIRIS-APEX will first flyby Apophis at a distance of about 4,000 km from the object, then return in June of the same year to enter orbit around Apophis for an 18-month mission.
In addition, the European Space Agency still plans to launch its Hera spaceship in October 2024 to follow up on the DART Mission At Double asteroid Didymos and Dimorphos. DART struck the latter as part of a test of the kinetic impactor’s capabilities to potentially alter the orbit of a dangerous asteroid around our planet. Hera will study the binary asteroid system and observe the crater created by DART’s sacrifice to better understand the structure and composition of Dimorphos after the impact, so that we can put the results into context.
The more we study near-Earth asteroids like Dimorphos and Apophis, the clearer this context becomes. Perhaps one day, the knowledge gained from these missions will actually save our planet.