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Discovered in September of 1999, asteroid 101955 Bennu is a 500-meter (1,640 foot) asteroid that crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years. Because it has been observed for 17 years, astronomers have been able to plot its orbit very accurately, and have found that it will make a series of extremely close passes to the Earth between 2169 and 2199, but they calculate that the chance of an impact is only 1-in-2,700.

Unfortunately, this possibility of an impact has fueled the circulation of a great deal of misinformation on the internet, with most articles illustrating a civilization-ending impact to take place in 2135, with the equivalent energy of 3 billion tons of TNT — but this figure appears to be grossly erroneous.
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