Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Asteroid Bennu NASA predicts will hit Earth soon. But not to worry, scientists claim the incident took a long time and could happen after 2100 aka another century.
“We don’t have to worry too much about that,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist and principal investigator on Asteroid Bennu at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
According to Farnocchia, the threat of attack has increased from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750 which will occur 100 years from now. The threat of asteroid Bennu’s path is now being monitored directly by NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft.
Launch NPR, Bennu is an ‘asteroid debris pile’ shaped like a spinning top, and wider than the Empire State Building’s height, and was discovered in 1999. NASA considers Bennu and the asteroid 1950 DA to be the two most dangerous asteroids to cross our solar system.
NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft has returned to Earth after collecting samples from a large asteroid debris pile considered to be one of the two most dangerous asteroids known in the solar system.
Previously, Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in 2018 and provided a solid picture of the asteroid. The spacecraft collected two-and-a-half years of data to help scientists better predict the asteroid’s future orbital path.
Their findings, published in the journal Icarus, also help map the direction of other asteroids and provide predictions of the threat of other dangerous space objects heading toward Earth.
Quotes ABC News, scientists have estimated the probability of the Asteroid Bennu hitting Earth in 2200 with a 1 in 2700 probability. Meanwhile, in 2300 with a probability of 1 in 1750.
In addition, the Asteroid Bennu will be closest to Earth in 2135 when it passes half the distance from the moon. Earth’s gravity could change its course and put it on a collision course with Earth in the 2200s.
However, if Bennu crashes into the earth, the effect will not destroy life like it did in the days of the dinosaurs. It will only create a crater ten to twenty times the size of the asteroid.
NASA researcher Lindley Johnson said the destruction would be as much as a hundred times the size of the crater if an object the size of Bennu hit Earth.
He also added that NASA will work to push Bennu and other dangerous objects out of the path of Earth’s rotation. Because a hundred years from now we don’t know what kind of technology is there that can make this plan a reality.
November 2021, NASA will launch the first mission designed to hit a space rock and change its trajectory with the spacecraft, in order to deflect a dangerous asteroid.
(mrh/DAL)
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