OSIRIS-Rex Begins 7 Year Mission to Bennu

With our luck, the Osiris-Rex probe will perturb Bennu's orbit just enough during flyby to....OH SNAP!

Run for the hills, I mean dig a hole and jump in, I mean run somewhere, not sure where!

Gee, I hope some astrophysicist ran the numbers on that. OR, maybe they are hoping the perturbation will make Bennu miss wider for a few more rounds.

"Bennu is on an Earth-crossing orbit that circles the Sun every 1.2 years with an orbital velocity over 28 km/s (almost 63,000 miles per hour – mph). Bennu approaches the Earth every six years. At the time of its discovery in 1999 Bennu came within 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) of the Earth (~5.7 times the average distance to the Moon). Theclosest approach that we can predict occurs in 2135 when Bennu will fly 300,000 km (186,000 miles) over the surface of the Earth, well inside the orbit of the Moon.

Bennu also gets very far away from the Earth. In a single orbit Bennu travels over a billion kilometers (more than 620 million miles) around the Sun. At its furthest point it is over 340 million kilometers (211 million miles) away from the Earth. When OSIRIS-REx is at Bennu it will take over 18 minutes for a signal transmitted from the Earth to reach the spacecraft (and another 18 minutes for the spacecraft signal to be transmitted back to Earth)."

http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/nolan.etal.2013.bennu.pdf

http://spaceflight101.com/osiris-rex/bennu/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yarkovsky_effect

https://dslauretta.com/2013/11/27/how-to-get-to-bennu-and-back/

Nicely done with the links, <S> sir!