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This asteroid, which was discovered in 1999 and has a diameter of 500 meters, is one of two known asteroids in our solar system that pose the greatest threat to Earth, according to the US space agency.
NASA’s Osiris-Rex probe spent two years in orbit around Bennu, and left it last May to bring back samples collected during a few seconds of friction with the terrestrial asteroid which will reach our planet in 2023.
The mission made it possible to study the asteroid closely, greatly improving predictions of its future trajectory, and scientists concluded that by the year 2300, the probability of colliding with Earth does not exceed 0.057%.
“In other words, that means there is a 99.94% chance that (asteroid) Bennu is not on a collision course,” said David Farnocchia, a researcher at the Near Earth Objective Studies Center at NASA at a press conference.
impossibility
In September 2135, the asteroid Bennu will pass very close to Earth. This would leave the possibility of passing through the so-called “gravitational keyhole”, a region which would slightly alter the trajectory of the asteroid, due to the influence of Earth’s gravity, which would subsequently place it on a future collision course.
Before the Osiris-Rex mission, there were probably 26 “keyholes” of a mile or more on the Bennu Road in 2135.
Thanks to the analyzes enabled by the OSIRIS-REx probe, scientists were able to rule out 24 of these holes, and the last two remain.
According to scientists, the most likely date of the collision will be the year 2182.
And if that happened, it would be disastrous. “The size of the crater is typically 10 to 20 times the size of the body,” said Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Corridor Office. So for Bennu, the diameter of the crater varies between 5 and 10 km.
But “the destruction zone would be much larger than that, up to 100 times the size of the crater,” says Johnson.
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