NASA Will Explore Asteroid Apophis – TRANSCRIPT

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Amy Simon: Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid. It's about 340 meters across, so about the size of three football fields or the height of the Eiffel Tower.

Mike Moreau: On April 13th, 2029, Apophis is going to fly by the Earth at a distance of roughly 35,000km. It is very unusual for an object of this size to fly this close to the Earth.

Dani DellaGiustina: An asteroid of that size only gets this close to the Earth, a tenth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, about once every 7,500 years. So, this is kind of a civilization-scale event, but Apophis will safely pass by the Earth.

Amy Simon: If you happen to be in Africa or the right parts of Europe, parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, you'll be able to see it just looking up in the night sky.

Mike Moreau: We are very lucky to be able to observe this event with the OSIRIS-APEX mission. It's this amazing machine that was designed to go extremely close to an asteroid and study it in great detail.

Dani DellaGiustina: The OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft is going to hone in on the asteroid, to really understand Apophis, its composition, and then we're going to get a little closer, and we're going to start trying to toe dip into sensing the gravity field of Apophis.

Mike Moreau: Seeing what it looks like for the very first time is one of those really exciting moments in exploration. When we experienced that at Bennu, we had a huge surprise because it looked very, very different than what we thought, and we expect Apophis might have some surprises in store as well.

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