by Scientists have tracked down an asteroid the size of New York’s Empire State Building on Earth in 2182.
While experts don’t think it’s likely to touch the planet, many scientists have said it’s important to study asteroids and other objects from outer space and prepare for any eventuality.
Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which collected samples from the asteroid Bennu located about 200 million miles away, explores these issues in his new book, “The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System.”
Lauretta spoke with ABC News’ Linsey Davis about her book and her research.
ABC LIVE NEWS: Give us an idea why this is so important to prepare for now when something is more than a century and a half away.
DANTE LAURETTA: Yes. Asteroids are interesting for many reasons. The impact hazard is one of them, but it is also a treasure trove of scientific information from the early solar system. The asteroid has a chance of hitting the Earth. It’s not 100%. It is actually 0.05%.
MORE: How OSIRIS-REx capsule could hold keys to ‘building blocks of life’ on Earth
ABC LIVE NEWS: So relatively low.
LAURETTA: It’s quite low. I’d say you’d cross the street with those odds, but it’s important to understand this hazard in general and what we might do when an asteroid eventually collides with Earth, as it will many times. it happened. before throughout geological history, and it is the only natural disaster right now that we can do something about.
ABC NEWS LIVE: And you were part of a mission back in September that collected a small sample from this asteroid. What were we able to learn about the past or the present and the future, perhaps from that example?
LAURETTA: Yes. OSIRIS-REx is a NASA mission that went to this asteroid called Bennu, mainly to collect these samples and bring them back to Earth. We opened that canister, and analyzed the contents. It is actually rich in water in the form of clay minerals and carbon, mostly inorganic compounds. Those are key.
This asteroid is 4.5 billion years old, and we think things like this may have given the water in our oceans, the air in our atmosphere, and maybe even the molecules that gave rise to life on our planet. This example looks perfect to answer those questions.
ABC LIVE NEWS: Now, you’ve talked about how humanity is facing two very difficult decisions, right? One of them, which I had a question about because he had evacuated a wide swath of Earth because the asteroid could hit it. How would you even know? If we could evacuate a large part of the Earth how would you know which area to evacuate?
LAURETTA: People in the future, in the years before 2182, would have to track this asteroid very closely. We would need a telescope, maybe even a spacecraft at the object that is transmitting location information back to Earth.
And as it gets closer and closer to the planet, we would be able to predict exactly where it would eventually hit.
ABC LIVE NEWS: Okay, that’s one option, Option A. Option B is to put something up that could knock the asteroid off its current path. Which option do you think the smart money is on?
LAURETTA: We should definitely be tracking this object, and we will continue to do so in the future. And all the information we gathered from our mission will enable that.
So I think that’s Option A, because we don’t know if it’s going to hit Earth yet or not. So you wouldn’t have to develop a deflection mission until you were fully confident. The other thing to keep in mind is that we do not know if it is going to meet with 100% accuracy or not, but the people of the year 2135 will be because of that when Bennu will fly between the Earth and the moon. And that event will determine his future path.
And it will be pretty confident whether or not the impact hazard is real at that point.
MORE: ‘The Asteroid Hunter’ video unpacks details of rare asteroid headed for Earth
ABC LIVE NEWS Why have you done something that will not happen in your working life?
LAURETTA: This is about science. The big questions I’m asking, and I think everyone asks themselves at some point, are: Where did we come from? And are we alone in the universe?
I am trying to understand how life got hold of this planet. And could that happen on Mars? Could that happen on Venus? Are there life forms around extrasolar planets?
We don’t know how you go from inanimate to living. That’s the biggest mystery in science right now. And I think this asteroid has the clues and the examples we brought home.
‘Asteroid Hunter’ digs deep into a massive space object set for a close pass to Earth first seen on abcnews.go.com
