Will the asteroid Bennu collide with Earth? NASA determines the...

. asteroid Discovered in 1999 and with a diameter of 500 meters, it is one of the two known asteroids in our solar system that pose the greatest threat to the planet. groundAccording to the US space agency.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe has spent NASA Two years in orbit around Bennu, it left last May to bring back samples collected during a few seconds of friction with the asteroid’s land that will reach our planet in 2023.

The mission made it possible to study the asteroid closely, greatly improving predictions about its future path, and scientists concluded that by the year 2300, the probability of collision with Earth does not exceed 0.057 percent.

“In other words, this means that there is a 99.94% chance that (the asteroid) Bennu is not on a collision course,” David Farnocchia, a researcher at NASA’s Near Earth Objective Studies Center, said during a press conference.

impossibility

In September 2135, it will pass asteroid benno At a point very close to the ground. This would leave the possibility of crossing the so-called “gravitational keyhole”, a region that would change the asteroid’s path slightly, due to the impact of GravityThis puts him on a future collision course.

Prior to the Osiris-Rex mission, there were likely 26 “keyholes” of a kilometer or more in size on the Bennu Road in 2135.

Thanks to the analyzes allowed 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 usually 10 to 20 times the size of the object,” said Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Planetary Defense Corridor Office. Thus for Bennu, the diameter of the crater varies between 5 and 10 km.

But “the area of ​​destruction would be much larger than that, up to 100 times the size of the crater,” Johnson says.