Asteroid Bennu may hit Earth

Asteroid Bennu. (Photo: NASA)

It’s the quintessential doomsday: an asteroid wipes out life on Earth. The Bennu rock could collide with our planet, at least it cannot be ruled out.

It would be better for our descendants to mark themselves in red on the calendar of September 24, 2182. According to the latest calculations on this day, Bennu will hit the Earth. Bennu is the second most dangerous asteroid in the Solar System. As announced by NASA, the probability of a collision is currently one in 2,700, which corresponds to about 0.037 percent. By 2300 the chance of a collision is one in 1,750.

The gyro-sized and half a kilometer large space rock is one of the two most dangerous known asteroids in our solar system. Next to it is only 1950 DA, which has a 0.3 percent chance of hitting the Earth. However, not until March 16, 2880. By then it should have become clear whether Bennu has found its way back to Earth. While more is known about Bennu, however, a space probe on the NASA Osiris-Rex mission orbited the asteroid for years. A sample was taken from Bennus Regolith, a material that forms on rock crevices in the Solar System through various processes. The average diameter of the asteroid is about 492 meters.

Many factors play a role

Based on these samples, which are expected to arrive at Earth on September 24, 2023, new data should be determined that will show the path of Bennu and thus make Earth’s entry even more accurate. It should be possible to accurately calculate Bennu’s trajectory by 2135. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory with this accuracy before,” Sage David Farnochia From the Center for Bear-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He also noted that “the speed of the impact has only increased slightly,” but it will not be a significant change.

To predict Bennu’s path through the Solar System as accurately as possible, several factors must be taken into account. The team had to model the gravitational interactions between the asteroid and the Sun and other planets, satellites as well as more than 300 other space rocks and the pressure of the solar wind. However, by the year 2182, several generations of scientists will still have the opportunity to refine the calculations to the smallest detail.