Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of The Supermassive Podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, science journalist Izzy Clark, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst and the Society's deputy director, Dr Robert Massey.

Thank you to everyone who's sending in questions or posting them on the forum.

And remember, yeah, you can join the Supermassive Club for 3,99.

We've got a stargazing forum in there, book club, or you can just post your questions for the podcast.

Right. Robert, shall we start with this one from Kevin Dady? He's emailed us with this question about Benu.

He says, I listen to episode 62 about sample return missions.

The description of the surface of Benu prompted me to think about a possible impact with

Earth.

Since the surface of Benu is loose and seems mostly comprised of small pebbles and dust particles,

wouldn't this granular and loose surface fly off the asteroid in the upper atmosphere and burn away harmlessly leaving a hopefully

smaller core that could impact Earth? I imagine a spectacular meteor shower preceding the larger

cause impact, which because of its reduced size, would cause less damage and harmful repercussions, or might this have been considered in the original impact analysis?

Yeah, I was thinking about this.

It's a good question, Kevin.

Actually, I was thinking about this.

What do it work like that?

Would it like that?

Well, anyway, the context is that Benu has a 0.037% chance of colliding with Earth in the year 2182.

So, no need to panic. Right, no need to panic. Very low odds.

Right on the way off. It's 500 metres across, so it's a medium-sized asteroid.

You know, the majority are much smaller than that. But it is, for that, said, a lot smaller than the one that we thought wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Now, if it did hit Earth, though, the results wouldn't be great. And you're right that some of the outer material might burn off, but you have to remember that it's traveling so fast that it's only going to take a matter of seconds to slam into the atmosphere. It's just so fast that, you know, there isn't going to be

much time for the kind of disintegration that you're describing to happen. And there was a paper

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