Are you one of those people who steer clear of hotel room13, the 13th floor of a building or anything with a “13” attached to it? The fear of number 13 is known as triskaidekaphobia from the Ancient Greek word meaning “fear of the number 13”. Just to make matters worse, we also have the time-specific fear of Friday the 13th or paraskevidekatriaphobia, a fear that spawned the “Friday the 13th” horror film franchise in 1980. 

Well, prepare yourself for Friday 13th April 2029 as a 1,100-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis, (after the Egyptian god of chaos and destruction!!!), will make a close approach to Earth passing within 30,000 miles of the surface and making it visible to the naked eye. This is only one eighth of the way to the Moon and closer to Earth than some satellites. Thankfully there’s no risk of impact but if it did hit it would be a “city destroyer” and not on the same scale as the 6-9 mile wide asteroid landing at Chicxulub 66 million years ago creating a mass extinction of life including the dinosaurs. 

Apophis was discovered in 2004, and quickly made the list of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), or asteroids with widths of 460 feet or more that come within 20 lunar distances of Earth. The size of Apophis and its close trajectory meant the asteroid remained at the top of both the European Space Agency’s (ESA) and NASA’s “impact risk list” of PHAs. Then in March 2021 NASA scientists determined that Apophis actually won’t hit the Earth for at least 100 years. NASA and ESA plan to use this event to refine planetary defence strategies to enable us to deal with big dangerous rocks coming too close in the future. We will need to develop clever methods to deflect well in advance any approaching asteroid that has us in its sights. 

This Friday the 13th is actually a lucky chance when Apophis offers astronomers and scientists a rare opportunity for study this nearby hurtling rock up close and personal. Its scientific impact will be spectacular with space agencies from countries around the world closely tracking its trajectory. NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft will rendezvous with this near-Earth asteroid (NEA) and a planned flotilla of other little satellites will also welcome and study the visitor. Earth experiences just one such visit like this every millennium so it is a great opportunity to collect data that could help scientists better understand our solar system. As an asteroid that formed around the same time as the planets from leftover material around our young Sun, Apophis is an opportunity to determine what the solar system’s chemical composition was around 4.6 billion years ago. Wait a minute…this is set to happen in 2029… 2+0+2+9 = 13. Oh dear. 

By Glynn Bennallick