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He said an asteroid impacting Earth would cause a crater about 10 to 20 times the size of the object and spawn an area of devastation about 100 times the size of the crater.īut, Johnson added, “We really don’t think we need to do anything about Bennu. Johnson said researchers were studying ways to redirect the orbit of an asteroid should it ever become necessary to do so. “We are still looking for what we don’t know out there - the objects that haven’t been found yet,” said Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Researchers determined Bennu’s total impact probability between now and the year 2300 at about one in 1,750, or 0.057 percent. “We shouldn’t be worried about it too much.”įarnocchia said the risk from Bennu “is smaller than from the undiscovered population of objects of similar size.” It likely formed in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and has drifted much closer to. Bennu likely broke off from a much larger carbon-rich asteroid about 700 million to 2 billion years ago. “The impact probability overall is very small,” he stressed. Scientists think that within 10 million years of our solar system’s formation, Bennu’s present-day composition was already established. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before,” said Farnocchia, lead author of a study published in the journal Icarus. “The OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Scientists want to figure out how Earth’s gravity and a phenomenon known as the Yarkovsky effect will affect its future trajectory and the potential for an impact on a subsequent orbit. It will make a close approach with Earth in September 2135. The rocks and dust collected by OSIRIS-REx are scheduled to return to Earth on September 24, 2023.īennu was discovered in 1999 and is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid. a very small chance that it will hit Earth in the late 22nd century. Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft also collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid that will help researchers determine the future trajectory of Bennu. potential of Bennu-like asteroids and help fine-tune the trajectories researchers. OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft, spent two years near Bennu, an asteroid that is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, observing its size, shape, mass and composition and monitoring its orbital trajectory around the sun.
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Kehr, Journal of Space Operations & Communicator, opsjournal.An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said Wednesday. … The book is highly recommended for decision makers, but also for taxpayers to judge and understand what ‘their money’ achieved with respect to space exploration, and to keep track of the very complex and difficult decisions we will have to make for our global future.” (Joachim J. 57 (11), July, 2017)“Astonishingly, Linda Dawson was able to compile all this voluminous information on only 195 pages, including all the appropriate high-resolution images, many spectacular ones as they were published worldwide during the particular events. Upper-division undergraduates and above faculty and professionals.” (R. Each chapter also begins with a list of the key words indexed within it. of Washington, Tacoma) explores is that space exploration is important not only to further develop science and technology, but also to ‘gain political power.’ … Dawson commences with the present day and fills in the history as it relates to the topic of the chapter. Scientists have fine-tuned the path of the asteroid Bennu and say the odds of it smacking into Earth are higher than previously thought but still quite low.