#Finetune odds asteroid bennu update#

What’s new: According to NASA, the chance of the Bennu asteroid hitting Earth between now and 2300 is about 1 in 1,750. “We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before,” he added. “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,” study lead Davide Farnocchia said in a press release.

#Finetune odds asteroid bennu update#

Those samples won’t be in NASA’s hands until 2023 (OSIRIS-REx is still making the journey home), but NASA has already used what it’s learned from the probe to update its predictions about the Bennu asteroid. “An object Bennu’s size … would pretty much devastate things up and down the coast.” -LINDLEY JOHNSONīennu is about one-third of a mile (half a kilometer) wide, and if it were to impact Earth, it could cause serious destruction. It’s currently almost 200 million miles away from us, but it’s expected to get within 125,000 miles in 2135 - that’s about half the distance between Earth and the moon. The Bennu asteroid : NASA discovered the Bennu asteroid in 1999.

Right now, the PDCO is keeping a close eye on two particularly threatening space rocks, one of them being Bennu. If a large asteroid were to slam into Earth’s surface, though, the result could be devastating, so NASA established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) in 2016 to detect and monitor any potentially dangerous asteroids and create a plan to prevent impacts, if possible.īennu is expected to get within 125,000 miles of Earth - about half the distance to the moon. The background: Our solar system contains more than a million asteroids, and most are tiny and highly unlikely to come anywhere near Earth.