Winning the state’s VaxMillions lottery on two separate days if every eligible adult resident is entered and a new drawing is held every second.īottom line? Janson, an affiliate in computer science, says that if he were a betting man, he would put his money on our being just fine.Throwing a dart at a dartboard with your eyes closed and hitting a bullseye.Any four random people sharing a birthday in the same month (the odds of this are 1 in 1,750 exactly).Flipping a coin and having the first 11 attempts all land heads.They compared Bennu’s chances of hitting Earth to the approximate likelihood of: Janson and Morgane Austern, both assistant professors of statistics. This begs the question of just how good should we feel about our odds? We put that question to Lucas B. (In an unrelated development, NASA plans to launch a mission in November to see whether a spacecraft could hit a sizeable space rock and change its trajectory just in case it ever needs to.) The space agency, which has been tracking the building-sized rock since it was discovered in 1999, revised its prediction based on new tracking data.Įven with the small shift in odds, it seems likely we won’t face the kind of scenario featured that in the 1998 science-fiction disaster film “Armageddon” when Stamper, played by Bruce Willis, and his team had to try to blow up a huge asteroid that was on an extinction-making collision course with the Earth. New calculations put the odds at 1 in 1,750, a figure slightly higher than previously thought. Recently NASA updated its forecast of the chances that the asteroid Bennu, one of the two most hazardous known objects in our solar system, will hit Earth in the next 300 years. The experimental target will be the moonlet of a bigger space rock.Even Harry Stamper would probably like these odds. In November, NASA plans to launch a mission to knock an asteroid off-course by hitting it. “One-hundred years from now, who knows what the technology is going to be?” he said. Finding threatening asteroids in advance increases the chances and options for pushing them out of our way, Johnson said. Scientists already are ahead of the curve with Bennu, which was discovered in 1999. If an object Bennu’s size hit the Eastern Seaboard, it “would pretty much devastate things up and down the coast,” he told reporters. The area of devastation would be much bigger: as much as 100 times the size of the crater. 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. At a news conference on August 11, 2021, NASA scientists said there is a 1-in-1,750 chance that asteroid Bennu could collide with Earth between now and the year 2300.
Earth’s gravity could tweak its future path and put it on a collision course with Earth in the 2200s - less likely now based on Osiris-Rex observations. The single most menacing day is September 24, 2182.īennu will have a close encounter with Earth in 2135 when it passes within half the distance of the moon. Their findings - published in the journal Icarus - should also help in charting the course of other asteroids and give Earth a better fighting chance if and when another hazardous space rock heads our way.īefore Osiris-Rex arrived on the scene, scientists put the odds of Bennu hitting Earth through the year 2200 at 1-in-2,700. The spacecraft collected enough data over two-and-a-half years to help scientists better predict the asteroid’s orbital path well into the future. PHOTO: APīefore Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in 2018, telescopes provided solid insight into the asteroid, about one-third of a mile in diametre. This undated image made available by NASA shows the asteroid Bennu from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The spacecraft is headed back to Earth on a long, roundabout loop after collecting samples from the large, spinning rubble pile of an asteroid, considered one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system. “So I think that overall, the situation has improved,” he told reporters. While the odds of a strike have risen from 1-in-2,700 to 1-in-1,750 over the next century or two, scientists now have a much better idea of Bennu’s path thanks to NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft, according to Farnocchia.
“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 bad news is that the space rock has a slightly greater chance of clobbering Earth than previously thought.īut don’t be alarmed: Scientists reported on Wednesday that the odds are still quite low that Bennu will hit us in the next century.
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA (AP) - The good news is that scientists have a better handle on asteroid Bennu’s whereabouts for the next 200 years.
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