Together with the Space Research & Planetary Sciences division of the University of Bern, AIUB has been granted funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation for a 4-year project to prepare for the analysis of the asteroid Apophis within the frame of ESA’s RAMSES mission.
In April 2029, the roughly 375m diameter near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis will pass within just 32’000 km from Earth’s surface. Within the frame of ESA’s upcoming Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety (RAMSES, https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Planetary_Defence/Ramses_ESA_s_mission_to_asteroid_Apophis) a spacecraft will visit Apophis and closely observe the asteroid before, during and after the Earth flyby in order to measure its shape, surface, composition, and rotation. Investigating how these characteristics will be altered by the Earth flyby will provide valuable information about the asteroid’s structure and properties, which are crucial also in the context of planetary defence.
The University of Bern is directly involved in the RAMSES mission, because its Space Research & Planetary Sciences division develops the CHANCES instrument (Color High-resolution Apophis Narrow-angle CamEra System). This camera will take high-resolution images of Apophis and measure the asteroid surface reflectance at different wavelengths to study its physical properties and mineralogical composition.
To exploit the data which will be collected by the RAMSES spacecraft and two deployed CubeSats, the Space Research & Planetary Sciences division and AIUB have proposed to the Swiss National Science Foundation a joint project with the title “Characterisation of Near Earth Asteroid Apophis by exploitation of RAMSES mission data”. This project has been granted, opening the possibility for three Ph.D. students, a Postdoc and a software engineer to prepare for the exciting RAMSES mission.
At AIUB, the focus of the project will be on Apophis’ gravity field, rotation state, and interior structure and how to measure these properties from RAMSES mission data. Other parts of the project will focus on physical surface properties from the inversion of photometric data and on modeling Apophis’ formation, collisional evolution and tidal induced surface changes.
The project is planned to start in September 2026
