![]() ![]() In 2005, the asteroid, still considered a threatening presence near Earth, was officially named "Apophis," after the Greek name for an ancient Egyptian representation of evil. That collision may have cast the fragment we call Apophis on a trajectory that resulted in its current orbit that comes very close to Earth." "It has been stored in the asteroid belt for 4.6 billion years and might be a fragment of a larger asteroid that broke apart in a collision in the asteroid belt. "Apophis is a piece of an early solar system planetesimal - a planetary building block that never coalesced into one of our solar system's planets," Binzel said. Apophis will miss the Earth," he told via email. "But the three most important things about Apophis are: Apophis will miss the Earth. "What makes Apophis the poster child for potentially hazardous asteroids is that it will make the closest known approach to Earth of any large asteroid this decade. "Apophis is in the category of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) - asteroids with orbits that bring them very close to Earth now and for centuries in the future," said Richard Binzel, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even when this risk was negated, researchers still could not rule out the possibility that Earth's gravitational effects could influence the asteroid in such a way that one of its next visits could result in an impact, previously reported. The asteroid sat at the top of the European Space Agency's " impact risk list" of PHAs and NASA's Sentry Risk Table for 17 years, and was only removed in 2021. Initially, scientists were unsure whether the passage of Apophis would result in a collision with Earth. ![]()
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