Tsinghua students plan low-cost smallsat to fly past Apophis in 2029
Tsinghua's student-led START mission would launch in early 2028 and fly within 7 km of Apophis in April 2029.
Students at Tsinghua University plan to send a 300 kg small satellite to observe the near-Earth asteroid (99942) Apophis during its close approach to Earth in April 2029. The mission, START, is the first of the university's student-led Tianxing Program, a deep-space exploration initiative. It is described in a paper posted to arXiv on 16 October 2026.
START is scheduled for a rideshare launch into low Earth orbit in early 2028. It would then use solar electric propulsion to move to a circular mission orbit with a semimajor axis of about 38,000 km and an inclination of 55 degrees.
The spacecraft would make a high-speed flyby of Apophis from a closest distance of 7 km, at the asteroid's closest approach to Earth. The authors say Earth's tidal forces at that point offer a rare chance to watch a rubble-pile asteroid respond physically and dynamically in real time.
The payload is a high-resolution narrow-field camera, a wide-field navigation camera and three near-infrared multispectral imagers. The team expects centimetre-scale imagery and metre-scale reflectance spectra to characterise the surface morphology and composition and to monitor tidally induced surface changes.
Sourcearxiv.org