Year 2135; Asteroid Bennu could hit Earth

Note from Prakash: 
This is not one of those doomsday post. This is being tracked by NASA.

A Nasa spacecraft designed to save Earth from asteroids is ‘inadequate’ and will not be able to nudge a gigantic space rock onto a course which guarantees it doesn’t hit Earth in 2135 without using nuclear weapons. It is the warning from members of a US ‘national planetary defence team’ who have just published a study which says it may be impossible to redirect a huge space rock called Bennu unless we bring out the big guns.

Nasa is already working on a craft called HAMMER (Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response vehicle) that’s designed to blow up asteroids with nuclear bombs or steer the asteroid on a trajectory & that means it won’t smash into Earth.

Academics who work alongside Nasa as part of the planetary defence team ‘ultimately concluded that using a single HAMMER spacecraft would prove inadequate for deflecting an object like Bennu.

 Image credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Bennu is an asteroid of 500-metre-wide doomsday space rock and is big enough to wipe out a city. 

It has a 1 in 2,700-chance of striking Earth on Sept. 25, 2135, and it is estimated that the energy unleashed in this impact would be equivalent to 1,200 megatons, which is 80,000 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb.  

Bennu is as wide as five football fields and weights around 79 billion kilograms, which is 1,664 times as heavy as the Titanic. The probability of a Bennu impact may be 1 in 2,700 today but it will almost certainly change.

A mission launched in 2125 would require up to 53 launches of the Delta IV Heavy rocket carrying a single HAMMER to send enough of the planet-saving crafts to Bennu. Nasa’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft is currently on its way to collect a sample of Bennu and bring it back to Earth.

Track Latest update on HAMMER & Bennu