It’s big enough to destroy a city here on Earth and has been dubbed the ‘apocalypse asteroid’.
So you may be surprised to see that a space rock called Bennu is much more beautiful than you might think.
Nasa has just released a new set of pictures of the asteroid snapped by the OSIRIS-Rex probe from a distance of just 0.4 miles above the surface – the closest a spacecraft has ever come to a space object without smashing into it.
Asteroid Bennu is a 500 metre-wide monster which earned its nickname because there’s a very small chance of it hitting us.
‘This is the view from the closest orbit a spacecraft has ever made around a planetary body,’ Nasa wrote.
‘From the spacecraft’s vantage point in orbit, half of Bennu is sunlit and half is in shadow. Bennu’s largest boulder can also be seen protruding from the southern hemisphere.’
It has a 1 in 2,700-chance of striking Earth between 2175 and 2199 – which is really very good odds so there’s probably no need to worry unduly for your great, great grandchildren’s safety.
Osiris-Rex arrived at Bennu in early December and will try to collect samples of the rock in 2020 and attempt to return them to Earth.
It’s also believed Bennu may contain the building blocks of life, so recovering a sample will allow scientists to test a theory that asteroids carried vital chemical to earth which sparked the genesis of living organisms.
But the behemoth could also bring death on a gigantic scale, so the tests will also help to understand our nemesis and how to make sure it doesn’t hit us.
If a disastrous impact came to pass, it would release more energy than all the nuclear weapons detonated in the entirety of human history.
Bennu is as wide as five football fields and weighs around 79 billion kilograms, which is 1,664 times heavier than the Titanic.
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