Dazed by Günseli Yalcinkaya 8/12/2021
Go off Bennu!If mass wildfires and flooding weren't enough to get your existential cogs turning, there’s now a new threat to keep you up at night. Asteroid Bennu, the half-kilometer space rock hurtling through the solar system, is more likely to crash into Earth than previously thought.
But don’t spiral just yet: Scientists reported that the odds are still low that Bennu will hit us in the next century.
“We shouldn’t be worried about it too much,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who served as the study’s lead author.
The chances of the asteroid clobbering into Earth have risen from 1-in-2,700 to 1-in-1,750 over the next century or two. But scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path because of data gathered by NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft. “So I think that overall, the situation has improved,” he added.
More:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/science-tech/article/53810/1/good-news-asteroid-bennu-increases-chances-of-crashing-into-earth
