New OSIRIS-REx Mission towards a potential asteroid

NASA has put its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on a new mission, it left on September 24, this is the ship that sent us samples of the potentially dangerous asteroid Benun and is now leaving on a new mission to intercept another potentially dangerous asteroid for the earth, Apophis which is about 325 m in diameter.

This asteroid was discovered by a team of astronomers from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in June 2004. On April 13, 2029, this asteroid will pass only about 32,000 km from our planet, crossing within the orbit of geostationary satellites, it will be visible to the naked eye. seen as a point of light, a moving star.

The closest approach of Apophis will be over the Atlantic Ocean and it will move so fast that it will cross the Atlantic in just one hour moving at about 32,000 km per hour. There are a lot of illustrations about Apophis, some very bizarre, especially from the sensational media. , but we really don't have any real photos, we don't have any close photos of Apophis, as I mentioned there are illustrations of all kinds, the craziest one I have found is the one above. Apophis is small, it would cause a regional disaster but with its approximately 350 m that it has, it does not represent a Total destruction, it does not represent the end of humanity, but we do not know exactly what it is composed of, there are many doubts and to answer these Questions that intrigue scientists, NASA has put its spacecraft on a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It will arrive at the asteroid on April 8 a few days before its closest approach to Earth and will orbit Apophis for about 18 months in a regime similar to what it did with Benun. The spacecraft will perform a maneuver also similar to the one did to collect samples from Benun, although he will not be able to collect them because he no longer has the capsule, he only had one that he used for Benun, in any case he is going to do a similar maneuver in order to use his thrusters to alter the surface of Apophis and lift the material from the surface and thus be able to carry out an analysis of the materials of this asteroid. The problem with Apophis is that it can change its trajectory with this close pass and we would have a problem in the distant future because Apophis is a potentially dangerous asteroid due to that factor.

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