The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced a mission to study the Apophis asteroid when it passes by Earth at a very close distance in 2029.
ESA is the second major space agency, after NASA, to commit a space mission for Apophis that was once considered to be on a pathway to collide with the Earth. Apophis will come within 32,000 km of the Earth in 2029, offering space agencies a rare opportunity to study an asteroid from such close quarters. ESA said an asteroid of such large size comes this close to the Earth only once in about 5,000 to 10,000 years.
“ESA’s Space Safety programme… has received permission to begin preparatory work for its next planetary defence mission – the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (Ramses),” ESA said in a statement last week.
The Ramses spacecraft would approach the asteroid, which is about 375 m at its widest, before it comes to the closest distance to Earth and then accompany it on its pathway for some time, in a mission similar to the one planned for NASA’s OSIRIX-APEX spacecraft. More space missions are expected to join these two in studying this asteroid.
A few days ago, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) expressed its intention of sending a mission to Apophis. Chairman S Somanath said it was imperative for ISRO to “go and meet the asteroid” when it was so close to Earth.
Asteroids, rocky objects which are mostly the left-overs from the time the Solar System was formed, haven’t been the subject of too many space missions. But this is changing. Hundreds to thousands of asteroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, almost all of them burning out before reaching the surface because of air friction. Once or twice a year, unburnt parts of a few of them even make it to the Earth without causing much damage. But the possibility of a large asteroid colliding with the Earth causing widespread damage, even potentially eliminating all life forms, is not unreal. Such an event is supposed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 6.5 million years ago.
An important part of the study of the asteroids is to develop capabilities to protect the Earth from possible collisions. In 2022, NASA demonstrated this ability for the first time with the DART mission. A spacecraft sent for this purpose made a head-on collision with a faraway asteroid and succeeded in deviating it from its trajectory. That asteroid posed no threat to the Earth but the mission showed that such a manoeuvre could actually bring desired result in a more realistic situations as well.
ESA said its researchers would study the asteroid as Earth’s gravity alters its physical characteristics. “Their findings will improve our ability to defend our planet from any similar object found to be on a collision course in the future,” it said.
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,” Patrick Michel, director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), was quoted as saying in the statement.
“For the first time ever, 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,” Michel said.
ESA said the Ramses spacecraft would need to be launched in April 2028 in order for it to reach the designated location in February 2029, two months before Apophis makes it close approach.
“Using a suite of scientific instruments, the spacecraft will conduct a thorough before-and-after survey of the asteroid’s shape, surface, orbit, rotation and orientation. By analysing how Apophis changes during the flyby, scientists will learn a lot about the response of an asteroid to external forces as well as asteroid composition, interior structure, cohesion, mass, density, and porosity. These are all very important properties for assessing how best to knock a hazardous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. As asteroids are also time capsules formed over four billion years ago, data from Ramses will also offer new scientific insights into the formation and evolution of Solar System,” the ESA statement said.
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