Asteroid 101955 Bennu

    Image 1 Caption: The orbits around the Sun ☉ of NEA (near-Earth asteroid) and PHA (potentially hazardous asteroid) 101955 Bennu (AKA 1999 RQ36) and the 4 inner Solar System planets (i.e., Mercury ☿, Venus ♀, Earth ⊕, and Mars ♂).

    Features:

    1. Bennu (named after ancient Egyptian god Bennu) is a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA), one of the leading ones, given its relatively large size and probability of impacting Earth.

      See NASA/JPL Center for Near Earth Object Studies' (CNEOS') Sentry Risk Table where the threat of NEOs is ranked by the Palermo (technical impact hazard) scale which combines probability of impact and danger of impact with some weighting.

      See also CEOS: Bennu for more details on the threat from Bennu which the 2nd highest on Palermo scale. First is 1950 DA.

      Actually, Bennu's cumulative probability of impact (in the year range 2178--2290) is the unthreatening 5.7*10**(-4) ≅ 1/1750 (CNEOS: Sentry Risk Table).

      As the period of possible impact approaches, the probability of impact will likely decrease to zero, but if it is going to impact, it will increase to 1.

    2. Bennu has mean diameter ∼ 0.49 km, and so could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor (see Asteroid file: impactor_threat_diagram.html).

      A Bennu impact is estimated have an explosive yield of 1200 megatons of TNT (see Wikipedia: 101955 Bennu: Possible Earth impact).

    3. Bennu is believed to be rubble pile asteroid with macroporosity 40(10) % (see Wikipedia: 101955 Bennu: Physical characteristics).

      Asteroid 101955 Bennu image

      Image 2 Caption: "This mosaic image of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on 2018 Dec02 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (2016--2023) from a range of ∼ 15 miles (∼ 24 kilometers). The image was obtained at a 50° astronomical phase angle (with angle subtended at the asteroid) between the spacecraft and Sun: so we are seeing Bennu's terminator and some of its nightside. Bennu spans ∼ 1,500 pixels in the PolyCam's field of view (FOV). (Slightly edited.)

    Images:
    1. Credit/Permission: NASA, JPL, 2016 (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:Hadron137, 2016) / Public domain.
      Image link: Wikimedia Commons: File:Bennu Orbit.png.
    2. Credit/Permission: NASA, Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), University of Arizona, 2018 (uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:, 2018) / Public domain.
      Image link: Wikimedia Commons: File:BennuAsteroid.jpg
    Local file: local link: bennu_orbit.html.
    File: Asteroid file: bennu_orbit.html.