Scientists finetune odds asteroid12/27/2022 ![]() If Bennu did slam into Earth, it wouldn't wipe out life, dinosaur-style, but rather create a crater roughly 10 to 20 times the size of the asteroid, said Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater. If an object Bennu's size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it “would pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,” he told reporters. Scientists already are ahead of the curve with Bennu, which was discovered in 1999. Finding threatening asteroids in advance increases the chances and options for pushing them out of our way, Johnson said. ![]() “One-hundred years from now, who knows what the technology is going to be?” he said. In November, NASA plans to launch a mission to knock an asteroid off-course by hitting it. ![]() "I think that, overall, the situation has improved." Precision counts The experimental target will be the moonlet of a bigger space rock."The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change, the impact probability is pretty much the same," lead author Davide Farnocchia, who works at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies in California, said during a news conference held Wednesday (Aug. I think that, overall, the situation has improved. OSIRIS-REx (formally known as Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and slipped into orbit around the asteroid Bennu in December 2018.Īfter its arrival, the spacecraft spent nearly two and a half years studying the space rock from orbit, swooping in, hovering overhead and inspecting the rock in every way possible. ![]()
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