NASA Spacecraft Provides Insight into Asteroid Bennu’s Future Orbit
Asteroid Bennu, Scientists have a clearer idea of where the asteroid Bennu will be in the next 200 years. The space rock, they said, has a somewhat higher risk of colliding with Earth than previously assumed, media reported Wednesday, Aug. 11.
MEAWW recently reported on other news about outer space. The Perseid meteor shower, which also started on Wednesday, is expected to continue through Aug. 13. 2021 will be a treat for skywatchers as they will present the Moon in all its splendor, including three super moons, a blue moon, and two lunar eclipses. Other celestial events aligned this year are the Draconid and Orionid showers in October and the Geminids in December, scheduled to be the strongest meteor showers of this year.
With the news of the asteroid Bennu hitting Earth, it is natural to be alarmed and concerned. There’s no reason to be, however, scientists said in a new study reported Wednesday that the odds of Bennu hitting us in the next century are still pretty low. This is what you need to know.
What is the asteroid Bennu?
101955 Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid of the Apollo group that was identified on September 11, 1999 by the LINEAR Project. It is a potentially dangerous object with the second-highest cumulative rating on the Palermo Technical Impact Risk Scale, according to the Sentry Risk Table.
Bennu, the cup-shaped pile of debris that orbits the sun in relative solitude, has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years. The asteroid, which is about a third of a mile wide at its equator, is not a direct threat to Earth. However, there is a slight risk that Bennu will collide with Earth hundreds of years from now.
“Bennu is by far the best-characterized asteroid in the solar system,” said University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator and lead author of the study. “We know where it will be 100 years into the future, in meters. No other object in the solar system has that level of fidelity to its orbital solution, even the Earth! ”
When will Bennu arrive on Earth?
Scientists used data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to build an accurate estimate of Bennu’s orbit and future focus of our home planet in a new study published in the scientific journal Icarus. The researchers then looked at the risk of effect between now and 2300, National Geographic reported.
Over the next three centuries, the analysis predicts a 1 in 1,750 chance of a subsequent collision, which is slightly higher than previously projected. Almost most of the most dangerous contacts with Bennu will take place in late 2100 and early 2200, with the most likely impact occurring on September 24, 2182. Bennu has a one in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth that Tuesday.
The scientists, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, arrived at their new estimate by identifying Bennu’s distance from Earth at about seven feet hundreds of times between 2019 and 2020. “If you want to be able to predict where [an asteroid] it’s going to go in the future, that prediction is totally determined by how well you can measure where it is today, ”said University of Arizona planetary scientist Amy Mainzer, an expert on near-Earth asteroids. “This team has made an extremely accurate measurement.”
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Don’t worry too much about it
“We shouldn’t be too worried about that,” Farnocchia said. According to Farnocchia, scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft. While the odds of an attack have risen from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1750 over the next century or two, scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft. NBC reported. “So I think the situation has generally improved,” he told reporters.
Bennu, along with another asteroid named 1950 DA, is one of the two most dangerous known asteroids in our solar system, despite the slim chances that it will collide with Earth. If Bennu collides with Earth, it won’t kill life as the dinosaurs did, but it will leave a crater 10 to 20 times the size of the asteroid, according to NASA’s planetary defense chief Lindley Johnson. The area of destruction would be substantially larger: up to 100 times the size of the crater.
Bennu’s sheer magnitude “would pretty devastate things along the coast” if it hit the east coast, he told reporters. Finding potentially dangerous asteroids early increases the odds and alternatives for getting them out of our way, according to Johnson. “A hundred years from now, who knows what the technology will be?” He said NASA wants to launch a mission in November to hit an asteroid and throw it off course. The small moon of larger space rock will be the experimental target.