You might spend a typical Friday the thirteenth dodging sidewalk cracks or sipping warm tea on a quiet porch. On Friday, April 13, 2029, the sky plans to do something far louder.
A chunky space rock named 99942 Apophis intends to buzz Earth from about 19,400 miles (31,220 kilometers) away.
That sits closer than the big television and weather satellites that hum along at 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers). A stone this large—about 340 meters across—strolls by this close maybe once every five to ten thousand years. We get front-row seats to an immense cosmic flyby, entirely free of danger.
Things felt far more chaotic back on June 19, 2004, when Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi first flagged the traveling mountain from Kitt Peak in Arizona.
Early numbers sent heart rates jumping.
Calculations briefly tossed the rock high up the Torino hazard chart because astronomers wondered if Earth might tug it through a narrow orbital keyhole and line up an awkward reunion.
Clearer heads and bigger toys joined the search. Lance Benner teamed up with radar experts at Goldstone in California and Green Bank in West Virginia during March 2021 to map its path with radio beams.
Those echoes showed our planet remains out of the splash zone for at least the next hundred years.
Does sunlight warming the dark rock give it a gentle nudge through space? Some folks suspect this tiny push—known as the Yarkovsky effect—alters the path over generations, while others suspect the drift remains negligible. Without instruments floating right beside it, neither side can claim total certainty just yet.
Space agencies are already packing their bags.
NASA grabbed its trusty Bennu explorer right after it dropped off its dirt souvenir on September 24, 2023, and pointed the thrusters toward this new target. Principal Investigator Daniella DellaGiustina now guides the freshly named OSIRIS-APEX craft, though it reaches the rock a few days after the close pass.
Europe wants to beat the rush.
Their team designed RAMSES to launch in 2028 so cameras can greet Apophis before our planet shakes up its routine. Further out, a curious little CubeSat named LUMIO hopes to hover near the Earth-Moon L2 point to monitor how the neighborhood responds.
You might not even need binoculars.
Stargazers across Western Europe, Africa, parts of Asia, Australia, and eastern South America can simply walk outside and spot a spark cruising overhead at magnitude 3.1. Down in Chile’s Atacama Desert, giant observatories will probably shuffle their calendars just to track the quick blur.
Will Earth's tug trigger little landslides across its dusty ridges or rattle its rocky ribs? Perhaps it wobbles, or perhaps it shrugs off the visit without shedding a single pebble. Apophis keeps its inner sponge-like layers a secret, leaving everyone guessing until that sparkling Friday finally arrives.
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