I think it’s hard to justify since we’ve already done a successful asteroid rendezvous (a few, IIRC) and it’s unclear (to me) what we could learn from studying the surface of this particular one or even studying from the surface of this one.

If we knew how to move it from solar orbit to terrestrial or lunar orbit and then use it as raw materials, that might be profitable. Or at least a nice engineering challenge on the way to profitable asteroid mining. But, I think the delta-V we’d have to achieve for that might me more than we are capable of right now.

I do wonder if we could put something on it and use it as part of a measurement tool, like how they can stitch together multiple 'scope sensors? I forget what the name of that is. Differential capture? Diffusion imaging?

It is an interesting opportunity, we rarely get such close flybys well predicted, but someone closer to the science / smarter than me would have to put together a mission plan.

Probably not every 4 years. After 2032, Earth will not be near the intersection point of the two orbits for a while. It might be decades before it’s even close.

Yeah, I misspoke. I meant “will miss”, we’ve got enough observations that we know the “keyhole event” that was a possibility is no longer a possibility.

Apophis missed the keyhole, so no chance of impact this century, sorry. It would be a much bigger event, too, about 10-30 times the energy.

But, this noise does remind me of 2004.

I don’t believe it is a possible target given how the orbital disk of the asteroid intersects with the surface of the earth. That’s of we don’t change the orbit, if we decide that is necessary, we’ll probably try to get a complete miss instead of just changing the impact site.

DON’T LOOK UP

Definitions are tricky, and especially for terms that are broadly considered virtuous/positive by the general public (cf. “organic”) but I tend to deny something is open source unless you can recreate any binaries/output AND it is presented in the “preferred form for modification” (i.e. the way the GPLv3 defines the “source form”).

A disassembled/decompiled binary might nominally be in some programming language–suitable input to a compiler for that langauge–but that doesn’t actually make it the source code for that binary because it is not in the form the entity most enabled to make a modified form of the binary (normally the original author) would prefer to make modifications.