![]() ™ & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. This partial eclipse will be viewable in Europe, Asia, Australia, parts of North America and much of South Africa. Only part of the moon will pass into shadow as the sun, Earth and moon will not completely align. To avoid damage to the eyes while looking at the phenomenon, viewers should wear eclipse glasses.Ī partial lunar eclipse will also take place on October 28. The moon will appear smaller than the sun and be encircled by a glowing halo. During the event, also called the “ring of fire,” the moon will pass between the sun and Earth at or near its farthest point from Earth. People across North, Central and South America will be able to see an annular solar eclipse on October 14. Here are the full moons remaining in 2023, according to the Farmers’ Almanac: If you’re underwhelmed by the Draconids or bad weather obscures your view, this year has a few more meteor showers in store.Įach of the remaining meteor showers expected to peak this year will be most visible from late evening until dawn in areas without light pollution. ![]() Meteor showers are a great opportunity for time-lapse videos and long-exposure photography. “Learning about the composition will help us understand the history of the solar system and where these things came from.And don’t forget to grab your camera before you head out. “These asteroids are primordial samples,” Chodas said. Shortly after April 13, the craft - by then renamed OSIRIS-APophis EXplorer, or OSIRIS-APEX - will steer toward the asteroid until it is drawn into its orbit, eventually getting close enough to collect a sample from its surface.Īpophis is shaped like a peanut shell, a form astronomers call a “contact binary.” The hunk of nickel, iron and silicate is a relic from the earliest days of the solar system, a byproduct of the massive cloud of gas and dust that formed 4.6 billion years ago and eventually led to us. OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft currently ferrying home samples from the surface of an asteroid called Bennu, will rendezvous with Apophis in 2029. Though it may appear far away for those of us down here, it will in fact be near enough for NASA to reach out and touch it. In this case, it’s nature doing the flyby for us.”įrom the ground, Apophis will resemble a star traversing the night sky, as bright as the constellation Cassiopeia and slower than a satellite. Using the tool, you can track the planet’s vital signs everything from carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to sea level and soil moisture levels as well as follow the fleet of Earth satellites. “We usually send spacecraft out there to visit asteroids and find out about them. NASA’s real-time 3D visualization tool Eyes on the Earth got a recent upgrade to include more datasets, putting the world at your fingertips. “It’s something that almost never happens, and yet we get to witness it in our lifetime,” Farnocchia said. ![]() Within a few years, they were able to dismiss the even smaller chance of a hit in 2036.Īn approach this close from an asteroid this big occurs at most every few thousand years, said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL. Within a few months, scientists were able to rule out the possibility of a 2029 strike. The longer astronomers track an asteroid, the more clearly defined its orbit becomes. Since the scale’s adopted in 1999, none of the roughly 30,000 near-Earth objects known to exist in the solar system had ranked higher than 1 on the zero-to-10 scale. “That is very serious and, actually, a very unexpected and rare event.”Īstronomers use a color-coded warning system called the Torino scale to gauge the degree of danger an asteroid or comet presents to Earth in the next 100 years. “We were shocked,” said Paul Chodas, who manages NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. In a nod to its horrifying potential, they named it Apophis, after an Egyptian god of chaos. After calculating its potential orbits, astronomers were startled to realize it had a 3% chance of hitting Earth in 2029. ![]()
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