An impact would pack the energy of more than 1.1 billion tons of TNT, roughly two million times the energy of last year’s devastating port explosion in Beirut, Lebanon. That asteroid was probably about six miles across Bennu is less than a third of a mile wide, on average.Įven so, a collision with Bennu would be regionally devastating. There’s more than a 99.9 percent chance that Bennu will not hit Earth in the next three centuries, and an impact from Bennu wouldn’t cause a mass extinction like the dino-killing Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago. “This team has made an extremely precise measurement.”ĭespite the slightly higher chance of impact, the risks from Bennu shouldn’t keep anyone awake at night. “If you want to be able to predict where is going to go in the future, that prediction is entirely determined by how well you can measure where it is today,” she says. University of Arizona planetary scientist Amy Mainzer, an expert on near-Earth asteroids who wasn’t involved with the study, lauded the team’s “absolutely white-glove” calculations. No other object in the solar system has that level of fidelity to its orbital solution-even Earth!” “We know where it’s going to be over 100 years into the future, within meters. “Bennu is by far the best characterized asteroid in the solar system,” says University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx’s principal investigator and the study’s senior author. That level of precision is like measuring the distance between the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower to within a few thousandths of an inch. The team-led by Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory-reached its revised estimate by pinpointing Bennu’s distance from Earth to within about seven feet at dozens of times between 20. On that Tuesday, Bennu has about a 1-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth. Nearly all of the riskiest encounters with Bennu will occur in the late 2100s and early 2200s, with the single likeliest impact coming on the afternoon of September 24, 2182. The study finds a 1-in-1,750 chance of a future collision over the next three centuries-a slightly higher probability than previously estimated. The researchers then analyzed the impact hazard between now and the year 2300. In a new study published in the scientific journal Icarus, scientists used data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to make a precise calculation of Bennu’s orbit and its future proximity to our home planet. But hundreds of years from now, there is a small chance that Bennu could slam into Earth. The asteroid, about a third of a mile wide at its equator, poses no immediate threat to our planet. Please do not discuss the concept of the autotldr bot here.For hundreds of millions of years, a top-shaped rubble pile called Bennu has orbited the sun in relative isolation. NOTICE: This thread is for discussing the submission topic. Post found in /r/space, /r/space, /r/Futurology and /r/technology. Summary Source | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: asteroid #1 Bennu #2 scientist #3 impact #4 rock #5 But to accurately identify which asteroids might actually pose a risk, scientists need to be able to calculate as accurately as possible where a space rock's trajectory will take it.

One aspect of that work is finding as many near-Earth asteroids as possible - scientists have cataloged more than 26,000 to date, according to NASA. In September of that year, Bennu will swing past Earth - not close enough that there's any risk of an impact, but certainly close enough that Earth's gravity could nudge the asteroid a bit on its path. One factor that scientists were particularly concerned about is called the Yarkovsky effect, which is triggered by the constant temperature fluctuations that occur as regions of the asteroid pass in and out of daylight, gently pushing the asteroid. In addition to factors like these that affect all solar system objects, the team was also able to check the impact of two unusual characteristics of Bennu specifically: the plumes of dust that regularly shoot off the asteroid and the rock's interaction with the spacecraft itself. If the possibility of an asteroid called Bennu slamming into Earth a lifetime from now was keeping you up at night, NASA scientists think you can rest a little easier.Īs a result, scientists behind new research now say they're confident that the asteroid's total impact probability through 2300 is just 1 in 1,750.

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Finetune odds bennu hitting earth