101955 Bennu has a mean diameter of 490 m (1,610 ft; 0.30 mi)
Bennu is the target of the OSIRIS-REx mission which is intended to return its samples to Earth in 2023 for further study.[15][16][17] On 3 December 2018, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu after a two-year journey.[18] It orbited the asteroid and mapped out Bennu’s surface in detail, seeking potential sample collection sites. Analysis of the orbits allowed calculation of Bennu’s mass and its distribution.[19]
On 20 October 2020 OSIRIS-REx successfully touched down, using an extendable arm, on the surface of Bennu to collect a sample.[21]
Sentry is a highly automated impact prediction system operated by the JPL Center for NEO Studies (CNEOS) since 2002. It continually monitors the most current asteroidcatalog for possibilities of future impact withEarthover the next 100+ years
Your OP is pretty much a cut and paste of the opening paragraphs of the wiki article on Bennu.
OK. Bennu is out there. Bennu is big enough that if it hit Earth, it’d do a bunch of damage. Though far less than mass-extinction level damage.
And has a very small chance (as best we can tell today) of being anything other than something cool for our great^6-grandkids to look at in a telescope as it goes by.
Ho hum. Nothing to get worked up about here.
Though the fact NASA is visiting it right now as I type is really, really cool.
What is your opinion? Your title implies you think it’ll be a big deal, but you’ve helpfully and reasonably posted links only to factual sites, not alarmist sites.
By “us all” do you mean all humans or all life on Earth? Neither of those is likely given Bennu’s size. It’s big, but it’s not Chicxulub big.
And at least right now the odds are very much in our favor.
Its Palermo rating of -1.69 implies it’s about 1/50th as dangerous as the normal annual background noise of meteor impacts. Small beer indeed.
Because in GD it’s expected that you will propose a topic for debate. So what are you debating? That Bennu is big enough to kill us all? That it’s likely to hit us? That we’re better able than dinosaurs to prepare for an extinction level event? What’s your question? There’s no debate if all you’re doing is copypasta from Wikipedia.
The title of the OP is really wrong. (it looks like click bait) Not only about the chances of impact, but the size and composition point to a bad time for some if that happens, but not an extinction event.
As NASA reported elsewhere:
But, mission officials stressed, that chance is slim, and the space rock is not nearly big enough to pose an existential threat to the planet, despite what some media reports claimed over the weekend. [Potentially Dangerous Asteroids (Images)]
“We’re not talking about an asteroid that could destroy the Earth,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. “We’re not anywhere near that kind of energy for an impact.”
rboyce, you’ve previously been instructed not to post links that ask to be downloaded. YOU ARE ONCE AGAIN INSTRUCTED NOT TO POST LINKS IN YOUR POSTS, SINCE YOU DON’T SEEM TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS CORRECTLY.