The exercise depicting this fictional event is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), allowing NASA’s PDCO and other U.S. ĭuring the week of April 26, members of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) will participate in a “tabletop exercise” to simulate an asteroid impact scenario. In this instance, the scientists discovered a small thermal reaction which could slightly alter Apophis’s course. The Yarkovsky effect is when an asteroid or celestial body changes its orbit due to small push of heat, either from itself expelling gasses, or the gravitational push and shove from celestial bodies including the Sun and Earth. Scientists at the University of Hawaii detected a small Yarkovsky acceleration on the surface of the asteroid Apophis which could influence the asteroid’s path for its 2068 flyby. However, on April 13, 2029, Apophis will get closer to the Earth than some of the highest-orbit satellites surrounding the planet.
The asteroid posed no hazard to the Earth on this flyby as it was more than 40 times as far away from Earth as the moon. On Friday, a large asteroid roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower zipped past the Earth.