Scientists had expected Bennu’s surface to consist of fine-grained material like a sandy beach, but instead OSIRIS-REx was greeted by a rugged world littered with boulders – the size of cars, the size of houses, the size of football fields.The 3D animations on this page were created using laser altimetry data and imagery of Bennu taken by OSIRIS-REx.The Bennu albedo map was generated using images acquired by Pol圜am during Baseball Diamond Flyby 1.

This major validation, however, was accompanied by a major surprise. When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, its close-up images confirmed what mission planners had predicted nearly two decades before: Bennu is made of loose material weakly clumped together by gravity, and shaped like a spinning top. OSIRIS-REx is improving our understanding of asteroid Bennu’s future impact hazard.Complete transcript available.Universal Production Music: “Time Particles” by Laetitia FrenodWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel. 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. 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. Our planet’s gravity will tweak Bennu’s path, making it a challenge to calculate its future trajectory. On September 25, 2135, an asteroid called Bennu will make a close flyby of Earth.

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