NASA Launches Mission To Intercept ‘God of Chaos’ Asteroid Before It Scratches Earth’s Orbit

Get ready for history’s closest encounter as the asteroid Apophis is about to come knocking on Earth’s door on April 13, 2029. This near-Earth object wasn’t named the “God of Chaos” for nothing, as it measures over 1,000-feet wide. But leave it to NASA to find a silver lining in this impending doom, turning it into a great natural experiment for their proposed OSIRIS-APEX mission.

OSIRIS-REx just got back from its seven-year journey, where they retrieved samples from the asteroid Bennu, and now its team of space explorers wants to go on another mission with it. This time, their destination is Apophis, and they will be studying its tidal forces, as well as the accumulation of rubble pile material to understand the fundamentals of planet formation.

NASA’s initiative to send OSIRIS-REx to Apophis seems ambitious, but with this natural experiment’s potential to inform planet formation, it’s worth the shot. The team is renaming the spacecraft OSIRIS-APEX, signifying its new mission: Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Apophis Explorer. This name assumes that the OSIRIS-APEX can provide insights into studying the formation of other celestial bodies all over the universe, not just to study Apophis.

The agency’s principal investigator for OSIRIS-APEX, Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, shared in a NASA press release that the Apophis close approach is a “great natural experiment.”

DellaGiustina believes studying tidal forces and how rubble pie material accumulates will tell us how the solar system’s debris transformed into actual planets. She also emphasized that this study could lead to deeper and more profound insights into planet formation.

Although the Apophis rendezvous is potentially disastrous, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX mission to it aims to see how much we can learn from it. With hopes to unlock the DNA of planet formation, this expedition might provide insights that could help us understand how our world came to be. So let’s cross our fingers and pray that the “God of Chaos” won’t disappoint NASA, at least for the next few years.