Apophis can change his route.

Apophis will approach Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029, at about 38,000 km at its closest approach, but all asteroids move around the sun and impact or are altered by other planets, moons and even other asteroids, that is a cosmic dance with hundreds of thousands of objects where any of them can collide or gravitationally push another and this means that an asteroid can change its trajectory, going from a safe and peaceful trajectory around the sun to another that places it on a collision with the earth.

Apophis is an asteroid of the Aton group, asteroids that are named after Egyptian gods, but whose important characteristic is that they circle the sun and on their path almost all of them cross the Earth's orbit. There is a group called Apoelec that do not cross the Earth's orbit. , but obviously the ones that worry us the most are those that cross the path of our planet, since one day they may end up impacting us or the moon, since the poor moon also receives its share. You see all those craters that the moon has are impacts of asteroids that if the moon did not exist would surely have ended up colliding with the earth.

Of the Aton asteroids, the most worrying is Apophis, which despite what many media headlines say, is not a giant asteroid, it is medium to small. Apophis has a diameter of approximately between 325 to 350 m, it is not Not even the largest of its group, the largest is Aton, 1100 to 1300 meters in diameter, which, although it crosses the Earth's orbit, the closest it is to us is a little less than 17 million kilometers, so that Aton is not a threat to us at least in the coming centuries.

Apophis with its 350 meters is not a destroyer of planets as the media also say, nor would its impact mean a mass extinction, nor the end of humanity, although it certainly has a very respectable and disturbing size, it has a large enough size enough to devastate a large city such as New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, Buenos Aires or Madrid, it would have a devastating effect on tens of thousands of square kilometers and if it fell into the sea, which statistically would be the most likely, it would cause a tsunami, although not larger. than those we have suffered in the past, for example in Indonesia in 2004, which is not a consolation either because it is a terrible catastrophe.

Apophis is not a giant, it has a size that falls within our technological possibilities to be able to divert it, which would be the main option, or break it into fragments, which would be the last option, since in that case the fragments could also continue traveling in the direction of the Earth, although being smaller, most would end up disintegrating in the Earth's atmosphere. This has been demonstrated with NASA's Dark mission on September 26, 2022, where the Dimorphos asteroid of about 160 m in diameter was diverted and seriously damaged. with only a kinetic impact, that is, without explosives, with a single ship of about 620 kg.

Dimorphos is not that it was shot in another direction, it is a satellite asteroid of another larger one called Didimos, about 750 m in diameter, which Dimorphos continues to orbit, although the push altered the time of its orbit even more than those responsible for it had estimated. the mission and not only do we have the United States developing this type of planetary defense technology, there is also China, which is developing its planetary defense plans to divert asteroids.

That Friday, April 13, 2029, when Apophis will pass only about 38,000 km from the Earth's surface, this is the forecast we have, but it is a forecast that could change, it could change according to a new study published on August 26 in a scientific journal, by astronomer Paul Wiegert, an expert in solar system dynamics and who works at Wester University in Canada.

This astronomer that the probabilities that Apophis could suffer the impact of another smaller asteroid that will cause a change in its trajectory or that its trajectory would be altered by the passage near another larger asteroid, Paul Wiegert used computer models to simulate those probabilities including a approximate calculation of asteroids not discovered because they are simply too small or too close to the sun to be captured from Earth.

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