02:35 PM
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Scientists believe that September 24, 2182 marks the date that the asteroid “Bennu” will hit the Earth, so the American space agency NASA is preparing to undertake a dangerous mission to prevent a collision and save our planet from destruction.
According to NASA, this space rock passes close to our planet every 6 years, but it will have a very close encounter with Earth after another 159 years, and if it collides with us, its force will be equal to 22 nuclear bombs.
Although the odds of a cataclysmic impact are estimated at 1 in 2,700, NASA sent a spacecraft to Bennu 7 years ago to collect samples from it. They hope the data will help them prepare for an asteroid deflection mission similar to NASA’s DART mission, which successfully changed the orbit of the small asteroid moon Temorphos last year.
The asteroid samples will reach Earth this week, landing in the Utah desert on September 24.
“We’re now in the final stages of this seven-year mission,” Rich Burns, OSIRIS-REx program manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told the Sunday Telegraph.
Bennu is about 492 meters wide (about half the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), so it wasn’t big enough to cause global extinction.
NASA estimated that it could have an impact 9 kilometers wide and cause devastation in a radius of about 1,000 kilometers from the crash site.
Between now and 2300 the chance of Bennu colliding with Earth is 1750.
“The raw materials from asteroid Bennu will help shed light on how our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago and how life began on Earth,” said Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Operations Directorate in Washington.
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