![]() ![]() The successes of the past year or so have put engineers on a strong footing for such missions: NASA's Mars InSight mission placed the first robotically deployed seismometer on another planet. In addition to flagging some key priorities for the next decade, scientists also discussed some top-level mission concepts that could lay the groundwork for spacecraft to visit Apophis before, during or after its close approach. Although scientists have pinpointed Apophis' trajectory in 2029 to within a path just 7.4 miles (12 km) wide that stays thousands of miles away from Earth, they can't quite rule out possible impacts decades in the future - and that's in part because of uncertainty about the Yarkovsky effect. ![]() ![]() The tweaks the Yarkovsky effect cause in an asteroid's orbit are so small that scientists struggle to distinguish the nudges from instrument hiccups. ![]()
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