OSIRIS-REx Sheds Light on Hazardous Asteroid Bennu

  • Released Wednesday, August 11, 2021
View full credits

OSIRIS-REx is improving our understanding of asteroid Bennu’s future impact hazard.

Complete transcript available.

Universal Production Music: “Time Particles” by Laetitia Frenod

Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.

On September 25, 2135, an asteroid called Bennu will make a close flyby of Earth. Our planet’s gravity will tweak Bennu’s path, making it a challenge to calculate its future trajectory. During the flyby, there is an extremely small chance that Bennu will pass through a “gravitational keyhole” – a region of space that would set it on just the right path to impact Earth, late in the 22nd century.

Although it is difficult to determine the odds of this actually happening, new data from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft have allowed scientists to better model how Bennu’s orbit will evolve over time, and to better calculate the probability of an impact. Now, a new paper from the OSIRIS-REx science team gives Bennu a 1:2700 (0.037%) chance of impacting Earth on September 24, 2182.

Learn more about asteroid Bennu's updated impact hazard.

For More Information

See NASA.gov

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This page was originally published on Wednesday, August 11, 2021.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:44 PM EDT.

Missions

This visualization is related to the following missions:

Series

This visualization can be found in the following series: