The asteroid Apophis will skim close to earth in 2029 but according to the animation it will be very close to the moon aswell, will this mess up the moon`s orbit?

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Title explains it, the animation is in this article from Iflscience
But phew that was “close” to hitting the moon.

https://www.iflscience.com/astronomers-just-updated-the-chance-infamous-god-of-chaos-asteroid-will-hit-earth-73240

In: Planetary Science

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So the technical answer is yes – all objects with mass will affect every other object in the universe. So the asteroid will change both the orbit of the moon and the orbit of the Earth (as well as every other object).

The practical answer is no – the asteroid is _so much_ smaller than both the Earth and the Moon that the effects on orbits will likely be too small to even observe.

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