NASA Launches Spacecraft To Intercept 'God of Chaos' Asteroid

NASA is launching a mission to study a giant asteroid as it approaches Earth. After successfully completing a seven-year, four billion-mile trip to the space rock Bennu to collect samples and return them to Earth, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has a new name and a new mission.

The craft, now dubbed OSIRIS-APEX, will intercept a similarly-sized asteroid, Apophis, which is named after the Egyptian God of Chaos.

The spacecraft will intercept Apophis in 2029 when it comes within 20,000 miles of the Earth. Apophis will pass close enough to Earth that our planet's gravity will alter its orbit and change the length of its day. Earth's gravity could also cause quakes and landslides on the 1,000-foot-wide space rock.

OSIRIS-APEX's mission will be to study the effects of the Earth's gravity on Apophis and report back with the findings. Scientists hope the data will provide more details about how planets in our solar system formed.

"The close approach is a great natural experiment," Dani Mendoza DellaGiustina, principal investigator for OSIRIS-APEX, said in a NASA press release. "We know that tidal forces and the accumulation of rubble pile material are foundational processes that could play a role in planet formation. They could inform how we got from debris in the early solar system to full-blown planets."