There’s more than a 99.9 percent chance that Bennu will not hit Earth in the next three centuries, and an impact from Bennu wouldn’t cause a mass extinction like the dino-killing Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago. “This team has made an extremely precise measurement.”ĭespite the slightly higher chance of impact, the risks from Bennu shouldn’t keep anyone awake at night. “If you want to be able to predict where is going to go in the future, that prediction is entirely determined by how well you can measure where it is today,” she says. University of Arizona planetary scientist Amy Mainzer, an expert on near-Earth asteroids who wasn’t involved with the study, lauded the team’s “absolutely white-glove” calculations. No other object in the solar system has that level of fidelity to its orbital solution-even Earth!” “We know where it’s going to be over 100 years into the future, within meters.

“Bennu is by far the best characterized asteroid in the solar system,” says University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx’s principal investigator and the study’s senior author. That level of precision is like measuring the distance between the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower to within a few thousandths of an inch. The team-led by Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory-reached its revised estimate by pinpointing Bennu’s distance from Earth to within about seven feet at dozens of times between 20.

On that Tuesday, Bennu has about a 1-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth. Nearly all of the riskiest encounters with Bennu will occur in the late 2100s and early 2200s, with the single likeliest impact coming on the afternoon of September 24, 2182. The study finds a 1-in-1,750 chance of a future collision over the next three centuries-a slightly higher probability than previously estimated. The researchers then analyzed the impact hazard between now and the year 2300. In a new study published in the scientific journal Icarus, scientists used data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to make a precise calculation of Bennu’s orbit and its future proximity to our home planet. But hundreds of years from now, there is a small chance that Bennu could slam into Earth. The asteroid, about a third of a mile wide at its equator, poses no immediate threat to our planet. This is the asteroid size that caused the devastating Tunguska event.For hundreds of millions of years, a top-shaped rubble pile called Bennu has orbited the sun in relative isolation. NASA Ames Research Center estimates that there are around 2,100 asteroids larger than 1 kilometres and maybe 320,000 larger than 100 meters. NASA mentions that there are more than 100 ring-like structures on Earth, which are recognized as definite impact craters. However, bigger asteroids manage to reach the Earth and some have caused widespread carnage, with one causing the extinction of dinosaurs. Even 33-feet sized meteoroids are destroyed in the Earth's atmosphere on entering. Those shooting stars in our night sky are basically the burning debris of these meteors. On the other hand, Earth's thick atmosphere protects us from the masses of small asteroids, or meteors which pelt our planet every day. Space bodies with no atmosphere allow small asteroids or comets to hit the surface without any hindrance. However, there is a big difference between the Moon and the Earth. Same is the case with Earth, but the craters caused by asteroid impacts have been worn away by the wind, rain and other natural phenomena.

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