Bennu Remains One Of Our Solar System’s Most Hazardous Asteroids

NASA researchers released a study Wednesday that informs the community about potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu through the year 2300, using precision-tracking data from the agency’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft.

The study, “Ephemeris and hazard assessment for near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu based on OSIRIS-REx data.” was published by the journal Icarus.

“NASA’s Planetary Defense mission is to find and monitor asteroids and comets that can come near Earth and may pose a hazard to our planet,” said Kelly Fast, program manager for the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We carry out this endeavor through continuing astronomical surveys that collect data to discover previously unknown objects and refine our orbital models for them. The OSIRIS-REx mission has provided an extraordinary opportunity to refine and test these models, helping us better predict where Bennu will be when it makes its close approach to Earth more than a century from now.”

NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to predict Bennu’s orbit and impact probability, through the year 2300 which is about 1 in 1,750. Sept. 24, 2182, marks the date with the highest probability for impact, with chances being 1 in 2,700. Although the probability of hitting Earth is low, Bennu, alongside another asteroid called 1950 DA, remains the most hazardous in our solar system at this time.

OSIRIS-REx spent more than two years in close proximity to the asteroid, after leaving Bennu in May, gathering information and samples from its surface, set to be delivered to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023.

“The OSIRIS-REx data give us so much more precise information, we can test the limits of our models and calculate the future trajectory of Bennu to a very high degree of certainty through 2135,” said study lead Davide Farnocchia, of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before.”

FMI: www.nasa.gov