


Just days before NASA unveils the biggest sample yet from an asteroid, the agency said it is monitoring that very asteroid because there is a chance, albeit small, that it could "impact" Earth in the 22nd century.
Bennu will make "a close flyby" of Earth on Sept. 25, 2135, almost 112 years from now to the day. NASA said the Earth will alter the asteroid's path, making it challenging to predict its future trajectory. However, there is an "extremely small chance" — 0.037% — Bennu could pass through a "gravitational keyhole," setting it to "impact" Earth on September 24, 2182.
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"We’ve never modeled an asteroid’s trajectory to this precision before,” Davide Farnocchia, the study lead from the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in 2021. Bennu was discovered in 1999 and is about the width of the Empire State Building (one-third of a mile); it is believed to be a remnant from a much larger asteroid that crashed into another space rock, the Associated Press reported.
"Scientists believe Bennu holds leftovers from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago," the outlet added. Such fascination over the asteroid led NASA to launch the $1 billion mission to collect a sample in 2016, arriving two years later. It took two more years for the spacecraft to pick a place to sample, but having done so successfully, it is expected to return home on Sunday to unveil the results.
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"I ask myself how many heart-pounding moments can you have in one lifetime because I feel like I might be hitting my limit," said Dante Lauretta, the mission’s lead investigator.
The return mission from the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer) team will arrive at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range, NASA said. The public can even register to attend the return virtually.