Ryugu and Bennu are asteroids that are part of many of the Near Earth Objects. Many space organizations of the world are monitoring the orbits of bunch of Near Earth Objects in order to calculate if their path will cross with earth or if they are on the collision path. NASA’s JPL has a Centre for Near Earth Object Studies that is computing asteroid and comet orbits and their odds of Earth impact.

Lets looks at these two asteroids. Recently with so much news about collecting samples from these celestial bodies that will improve understanding of the universe and life on earth.

Ryugu

JAXA ( Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 arrived at Ryugu in June 2018 after four years of travel time and left in November 2019 after executing tests and collecting samples. Recently Hayabusa2 dropped the samples to earth and was collected from remote Woomera Range, Australia on 6th December. Ryugu is an asteroid about 1 KM in diameter. Ryugu is named so based on Japanese folktale where a fisherman goes to the magical underwater palace called Ryugu on the back of a turtle and bring back mysterious box much like Hayabusa2. Hayabusa2 after dropping the capsule is again on onward journey to other asteroids.

Bennu

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx landed on Bennu on 20th October 2020 and reached near to Bennu’s surface and using a arm called TAGSAM collected samples and the vehicle has started the return journey to earth. It is estimated to arrive at in Utah on 24 September 2023. Bennu has been named by a student entries and it is based on Egyptian mythological bird that is related to Sun, creation and rebirth. The diameter is about 0.49 KM Bennu is number 2 on the CNEOS list of Sentry, which is the collision monitoring system and has 1 in 2700 odds of collision or 99.963 chance that it will miss the earth in the year ranging 2175-2199. This range would improve as the years pass by.

What is the future?

We all know that Dinosaurs ruled the earth long time ago and their extinction was probably due to large impact of asteroid. A possibility of such a large object which was estimated to be more than 14KM diameter isn’t looking like a possibility from the studies that scientists are working on. It is also amazing to see what scientists have been able to achieve by calculating the orbits precisely, calculating arrival date precisely on the Asteroid and back to earth. The science has been able to progress quite a lot. At the same time we still don’t know intricacies of life at earth like how does the immune system work and why the virus take few to deathbed whereas others without any symptoms at all and only detected if tested for the virus.

2020 has been a very a good year for the space side. Spacex started with taking two NASA Astronauts to the ISS successfully in their own designed Dragon Capsule. Then we have these Asteroid samples collection projects from JAXA and NASA. Spacex again took four Astronauts to ISS again. China successfully launched to land on Moon while collecting samples from there back to earth by the Chang’e 5. Spacex tested the Starship prototype SN8 also this month.

In medieval days the civilization dared to become Sea Faring civilization that brought about huge changes to the economies. Are we nearing a time when the civilization will become Space Faring. It looks like it is possible more than ever.