Apophis 2068: Asteroid Apocalypse?

Will the asteroid Apophis be the end of life on Earth as we know it?

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Since the beginning of life on Earth over 3 billion years ago, there have been at total of 5 major extinction level events. The most famous of these was the giant asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs approximately 66 million years ago. Now, another giant asteroid is fast approaching Earth once more. Will the asteroid Apophis be the end of mankind as we know it? Discovered on the 19th of June 2004, Apophis is named after the Ancient Egyptian God of Chaos. Much like the it’s namesake, the asteroid poses a devastating threat to man-kind. If it were to impact with Earth, it would be the largest impact event in recorded history, and millions would likely die. If Apophis does come crashing down to Earth, it wouldn’t be the first large asteroid to do so in recent history.

On the 15th of February 2013, news outlets around the world broadcast footage of a meteor crashing down over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. Measuring 20 meters in diameter, with an estimated initial mass of about 12,000 tonnes, the Chelyabinsk meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere with a weight heavier than that of the Eiffel Tower. Part way through the meteor’s descent, the massive object exploded in a giant air burst, resulting in a large shock wave that shattered windows in six cities across the region. The total kinetic energy of the impact came measuring in at 500 kilotons of TNT, or around 33 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. About 1,500 people sought medical attention for injuries, caused mainly by broken glass.

In 1908, an event 60 times larger than the Chelyabinsk Meteor happened over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian forest. This meteor impact, which has become known as the Tunguska event, is believed to have exploded in a similar fashion to the Chelyabinsk Meteor, although this time the explosion and resulting air burst released the same amount of energy as 30 megatons of TNT, or about 2,000 times more energy that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The shock wave from the explosion was strong enough to measure 5.0 on the Richter scale, and flattened 80 million trees over an 830 square mile area. This makes the Tunguska event the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history, though much larger impacts are known to have occurred in prehistoric times.

Fortunately, these meteor impacts resulted in few casualties, as they occurred over rural, sparsely populated Russia. However, a similar event over a large metropolitan area could prove to be catastrophic. Apophis first raised eyebrows in 2004, when initial observations indicated a probability of 2.7% that it would hit the Earth or the Moon on the 13th of April 2029. During this period, Apophis set the record for highest rating on the Torino scale, the scale used for categorising the impact hazard associated with near-Earth objects. After additional observations provided improved predictions, the concerns about an impact in 2029 were disregarded, although Apophis will still pass us closer than most geostationary navigation satellites, and will even be visible to the naked eye. This passing in 2029 has become known as the ‘Great Encounter’. Recent calculations taking the Yarkovsky effect into account suggest that there is a small chance of an Earth impact in 2068. The Yarkovsky effect is a force acting on an orbiting body in space, caused by the emission of photons. This force has the potential to push Apophis into a collision path with Earth, although the probability of a collision remains at a chance of 1 in 150,000 in 2068, and 1 in 110,000 before 2105. These may seem like insignificant numbers, however the chance of Apophis impacting Earth is about 100,000 times more likely than winning the lottery.

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.
Music: Epidemic Sound

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