Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist, Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst.

We are exhausted from answering all of your excellent questions that you sent in for our last episode two weeks ago.

So honestly, if you haven't listened to that yet, they were excellent questions.

You should go listen to that.

But we wanted to take a moment now to have a look at some recent space news because

a lot has been going on.

It's like all of the space agencies knew that we were doing this because there's been

so many space new

stories recently. So NASA, for example, they've recently shared the first results taken from

a 4.6 billion-year-old asteroid called Benu. And with us, as usual, is the deputy director

of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr Robert Massey.

So, Robert, can you tell us more about this story?

How far out is this asteroid?

Well, at this moment, Benu is 110 million kilometres away from the Earth.

But the point is that in September each year, it can get rather closer than that.

So it's what's described as a potentially hazardous asteroid,

which means there's a theoretical risk that it might hit the Earth someday. And the cumulative risk

assessed for this is about one in 1,750. And by the way, that's in the 22nd and 23rd century. So

no need to panic. It's probably, chances are, it'll go down even lower than that. Usually it does

that way when people sit there and analyze the orbits more and then work out exactly where it is. But the point is that there's been a mission there to go out and have a look at it. And it takes about a year and a bit to go around the sun. It orbits between just inside the orbit of Earth and out towards Mars. So it goes around more of an elliptical orbit than the Earth does.

But it might actually even be thrown out the solar system altogether or even crash into Venus or the

sun instead of the Earth, which would be obviously better from our perspective.

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