Halting the Threat of Apophis: What Can We Do Now?
Halting the Threat of Apophis: What Can We Do Now? The path of the asteroid Apophis has been a bit of a wild one. On April 13th, 2014, it was discovered that Apophis was on a collision course with Earth. Given that it’s a kilometer wide asteroid, and has a diameter of about 20 kilometers, this was a serious threat. The only way to stop it was to send a spacecraft, called “Asteroid Redirect Mission”, to collide it with the asteroid, while it was still in space. Unfortunately, the spacecraft was destroyed in a launch failure. However, the mission was still a success in that it showed that we could potentially stop an asteroid from colliding with Earth. 1. The threat of Apophis The story of Apophis is one that we all know well. For centuries, scientists have been trying to find a way to destroy this serpent, the size of a Boeing 747, which orbits the sun twice every 30 years. We know that a comet called Chiron is hurtling towards the sun, and that it may collide with Apophis i