The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft is scheduled to launch next month.
By: Rakesh Agrawal, ‘Ridh’
It is said that millions of years ago, an asteroid struck our earth that wiped out colossal dinosaurs from it. Now, NASA fears another giant asteroid is all set to strike us and will soon be launching a probe to investigate this huge asteroid (See: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1532165/nasa-launches-probe-to-investigate-huge-asteroid-it-fears-could-one-day-hit-earth/)
This asteroid christened Bennu, is not a science fiction and it crosses the Earth’s orbit every six years and goes without creating even a ripple. But, this time, it is getting closer and closer, so closer that it is due to pass between the Earth and the moon in 2135, just about 290,000 km away.
This asteroid is half a kilometer in diameter and travels at 63,000 miles per hour, so if it diverts a little bit from its chosen path, it could jolly well strike us!
Since its discovery in 1999, it has been a concern for scientists due to the potential risks for Earth and now, after 17 years of its discovery, NASA is launching a probe to collect rock samples to help find out more about the rock and what impact it could have.
Dante Lauretta, Professor of Planetary Science at Arizona University, and the NASA expert in charge of the mission said: “If Bennu falls on the boundary, in terms of size, for an object capable of causing a global catastrophe.”
The OSIRIS-REX spacecraft is scheduled to launch next month and will arrive at Bennu in 2018 that will spend a year mapping the asteroid and collecting rock samples and will also measure the force that can alter the orbit of asteroids and potentially put them on a collision course with the Earth.
After probing it, the probe will return to Earth by 2023.
“We believe Bennu is a time capsule from the very beginnings of our solar system,” Lauretta said. “So the sample can potentially hold answers to the most fundamental questions human beings ask, like ‘Where do we come from?'”
People mustn’t have a fear psychosis as Bennu has a one in 2,700 chance of hitting Earth, and that’s too, in distant 2035!
And, by that time, humans would have developed the technology to destroy it, although we don’t have that capacity right now.
But, well before that, if the prediction of the Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders who eradicated smallpox during the 1970s, comes true, we, the humans will extinct in 100 years, thanks to overcrowding, denuded resources and climate change, making the planet uninhabitable and he said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause our extinction.
Fenner, 95, is the author or co-author of 22 books and 290 scientific papers and book chapters and has had a lifetime interest in the environment, and from 1973 to 1979 was Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at ANU. He has won numerous awards including the ANZAC Peace Prize, the WHO Medal, and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science. (See: Church and State: http://churchandstate.org.uk/2015/06/humans-will-be-extinct-in-100-years-says-eminent-scientist/).