Apophis asteroid could strike Earth in 2068, warn Russian scientists
The ominously-named Apophis asteroid could have hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century, Russian scientists have warned.
Named after the Ancient Egyptian god of evil, darkness and destruction, Apophis 99942 is expected to come within 37,600km (23,363 miles) of the Earth, just a tenth of the distance between our planet and the moon, in 2029.
Researchers from the Department of Celestial Mechanics at St. Petersburg State University have warned that the 370-meter-wide near-Earth orbit space rock could smash into the planet at a speed of 7.43km per second sometime in 2068. However, to be on track for such a strike, it would somehow have to thread the cosmic needle of passing through a two-meter wide area of space during its 2029 close-Earth flyby.
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The Russian team’s findings will be presented at the Korolev Readings on Cosmonautics to be held in Moscow later this month.
Contingency plans to destroy the potential threat using nuclear weapons have already been devised by researchers from Tomsk State University in Siberia using a supercomputer. However, the latest Russian research runs contrary to multiple NASA calculations and revisions from back in 2013.