UCC professor says asteroid could hit Earth in 150 years

Viewers of movies such as ‘Deep Impact’ and ‘Armaggedon’ dramatising a possible end-of-the-world scenario when an asteroid hits Earth now have a date to put in their diaries.

According to University College Cork (UCC) astrophysics professor Bertram Bitsch, there is a one in 2,700 chance that our planet could be hit by an asteroid called Bennu. However, this end-of-our-existence possibility is 159 years away — and it may never happen.

It has been described in some quarters as the most known space rock in the solar system with a chance that it could hit Earth in 2182.

At just under 500m, it is big enough to create a six-kilometre wide crater and produce an air blast that would flatten buildings over hundreds of square kilometres, according to the Imperial College of London ‘Earth impact’ programme.

Professor Bitsch was speaking to The Echo amid a great buzz of excitement in the world of astrophysics following the return of a Nasa satellite probe, Osiris-Rex, from Bennu after a 4bn-mile journey to collect a sample of soil from the asteroid.

“We have some idea what the course of the asteroid will be, but there’s only a probability that’s attached to it that it might or might not collide with the Earth as we cannot calculate the trajectory with any precision yet because of the unknown gravitational encounters that this asteroid will actually have in the future,” said Prof Bitsch.

“There’s a probability of, I think, one in 2,700, that there could be a collision in 150 years from now, so it’s a low probability so, you know, better safe than sorry in order to figure this out and it’s something that requires long-term planning.

“That’s why it was so important for this mission to understand the asteroid better — so we know what we would have to actually do to avoid it, either to deflect it or even destroy it. That was one of the goals of this mission and the other goal was from the molecular and scientific point of view is to understand the composition of this material that we really can do the laboratory work to analyse the material, to find out its isotopic composition in order to learn something about our own formation history of the earth.”

The Nasa Osiris Rex spacecraft, which is actually little more than the size of a football, managed to collect 250g of soil from Bennu which will now be analysed.

Although this seems like a small amount, it is more than enough for the purposes of analysis of the composition of the asteroid.

According to Prof Bitsch, this analysis will give valuable insights into the origins of the universe.