APOPHIS T-4 YEARS WORKSHOP, Apr 8-10 EDT/Apr 9-10 JST, 2025, Tokyo/virtual

Update, March 22:  The agenda is available. A virtual option is available.

The first day begins at 9:30 am April 9 Japan Standard Time (JST) and the last panel begins at 4:15 pm JST (the ending time is not shown).
That is April 8, 8:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), to April 9, 3:15 am EDT.

The second day begins at 9:30 am April 10 JST and the last panel begins at 5:10 pm JST (the ending time is not shown).
That is April 9, 8:30 pm EDT, to April 10, 4:10 am EDT.

Original Entry: The “Apophis T-4 Years Workshop: Knowledge Opportunity for the Science of Planetary Defense”  will take place at the University of Tokyo, Hongō Campus, in Tokyo, Japan from April 9-10, 2025.  (Eastern Daylight Time is 13 hours behind Japan, so it will begin on April 8 EDT).

Workshops on ESA’s Hera and RAMSES missions will be held immediately before and after the Apophis workshop (April 7-8 and April 11).

More information is on the event’s website.

Apophis is an asteriod that will come very close to — but not impact — Earth on April 13, 2029. Scientists are eager to study it using ground- and space-based instruments.

RAMSES is a small spacecraft ESA plans to launch to study Apophis before it reaches Earth.  NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX will study it after it passes Earth. (OSIRIS is the spacecraft that returned samples of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in 2023. The capsule containing the samples separated from the main spacecraft and landed in Utah while the main spacecraft was redirected to meet up with Apophis in 2029.)

Hera is an ESA spacecraft launched in October 2024 to visit the double asteroid Didymos-Dimorphos that was impacted by NASA’s DART spacecraft in 2024 as a planetary defense test. Hera will collect data on how DART changed the double asteroid.