Amira Shehata wrote Thursday, September 21, 2023 05:00 PM NASA agency Seven years trying to prevent Bennu from catastrophically colliding with Earth. While Bennu’s chances of hitting Earth are only 1 in 2,700, the NASA team has classified it as one of the “most dangerous asteroids known.” In a worst-case scenario, an asteroid measuring 510 meters wide would… Approximately meters away, it will hit the Earth with a force of 1,200 megatons of energy, 24 times the force of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, astronomers believe that the asteroid “could cause continental devastation if it collided with Earth.”
When NASA sent its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid on September 8, 2016, part of its mission was to track Bennu for two years from 2018 to 2020 to collect data to better calculate its future path.
“We have improved our knowledge of Bennu’s path by a factor of 20,” David Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Science magazine. “NASA will make its final risk calculations on Bennu’s orbit during its next close-by Earth in 2135, about 47 years before its potential impact.”
“In 2135, we will know for sure, and in the meantime, Penuma also has something to tell us about the birth of our solar system,” Farnocchia added.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx rover went to Bennu equipped with the tools needed to map the ancient asteroid, a kind of time capsule of the early solar system, and collect rare samples of this material virtually untouched by human hands.
“This is pure, uncontaminated material that reveals the secrets of the early solar system,” astrophysicist Hakim Olloysi of Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory told ABC News of the samples.
“The long-term discovery would be to find biological molecules or even protomolecules for life,” Olloyesi added. OSIRIS-REx was not just the first asteroid sample collection operation undertaken by the US space agency.
