Photos from the NASA spacecraft also captured images of particles flying off Bennu a few times a week - making it what they call an active asteroid, a rare classification. If asteroids do have water, the possibility of humans living far from planet Earth becomes much easier to imagine. Scientists hope these small fragments from Bennu will shed light on the origins of life on Earth indicate whether we could mine asteroids for rare elements and signal whether Bennu contains water. Little NASA spacecraft OSIRIS-REx (or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) collected a sample from the asteroid in October 2020, and will return within three years with its precious cargo. That makes Bennu of extraordinary interest to scientists who want to piece together how our world came to be. Discovered in 1999, it’s roughly 4.5 billion years old and is believed to have formed 10 million years before our own solar system. What we’ve already learned, and hope to learn about it, could not only save the planet - it could also help change our understanding of what an asteroid (or even life) is.īennu is much older than Earth. What that effort requires is a lot more complicated, and less immediately perilous, than the movies would have you think, although the goal of saving life on Earth is just the same.įor starters, Bennu is far more compelling than some dumb rock. Those samples, once they make it back to Earth, will help physicists like Howley with their very important job - to make sure Bennu (and objects like it) don’t impact. Last fall, NASA collected a sample from Bennu, the first NASA mission to procure material from an asteroid as it traveled through space. It has a 1-in-2,700 chance of colliding, albeit not until 2185. Like Bennu.īennu, weighing more than 78 billion kilograms, is an ancient asteroid currently orbiting the sun on a path that brings it close to Earth.
She and her team of planetary defenders specialize in how we might deflect an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth. Howley doesn’t have an orange jumpsuit at hand, but her job is serious business.
“I would say the number one question I get when I tell people what I work on, is ‘Oh, like ‘Armageddon?’’ And it’s nothing like ‘Armageddon,’” says Lawrence Livermore National Lab physicist Kirsten Howley, whose day job includes defending our planet from asteroids.