The God Of Chaos Asteroid Is Expected To Have A Close Encounter With Earth On 2029
NASA EXCITED – A 1,110-foot huge asteroid is expected to approach our planet from a distance of about 19,000 miles on April of 2029.
The Asteroid ‘99942 Apophis’ was previously reported to possibly hit earth on 2029. Evangelical Christian preacher, Paul Begley, said that the huge asteroid is headed right for earth and could make a deep impact on Friday the 13th.
On the other hand, NASA is excited about the asteroid’s approach. In fact they see it as a great opportunity for scientific observation.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL’s radar scientist, Marina Brozovi, explained that about the actions to be taken during the close encounter in her statement:
“We’ll observe the asteroid with both optical and radar telescopes. With radar observations, we might be able to see surface details that are only a few meters in size.”
This is according to an article from MSN News.
The asteroid was named Apophis, with reference to the mythological ‘God of Chaos’ from Egypt. Scientist are so excited about the close encounter because asteroids of this humongous size passing by Earth at a very close distance is a rare sight.
Despite the approach being 10 years away, it has triggered a commotion among asteroid researchers. The planet’s close encounter is even the focus discussion of this year’s Planetary Defense Conference held at College Park, Maryland.
Apophis was discovered by a group of astronomers from the Kitt Peak National Observatory back in June 2004. However, they weren’t able to track it due to weather conditions and technical problems.
In that same year, another group from Australia spotted the asteroid. With their estimations, the asteroid had a 2.7 percent change of hitting the Earth.
Fortunately, the prediction have been disregarded.
Following the discovery, scientists were able to closely track the Apophis asteroid and declared that it has less than a 1 in 100,000 chance of collision with Earth.
That is all there is to it, at least for now. We’ll post updates as soon as we got them.